Moves & Countermoves
CCS Bard Graduate thesis exhibitions and selected works from the Marieluise Hessel Collection
March 29–May 3, 2015
Opening: Sunday, March 29, 1–4pm
Center for Curatorial Studies and
Hessel Museum of Art
Bard College, PO Box 5000
Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504-5000
T +1 845 758 7598
ccs [at] bard.edu
Moves & Countermoves explores exhibition-making as a game of establishing and breaking its own rules of engagement. Focusing on the relations between viewer, artwork, display, and institution, contemporary curatorial practice is interpreted here as a “slight of hand” tactic serving to play out, and to confound competing values within the art world.
Works from the Marieluise Hessel Collection are shuffled and reshuffled as curators and artists impose various selection criteria upon them. Moves & Countermoves draws from the collection to highlight a gameplay of exhibition-making strategies. Inside the museum and beyond its walls, artworks from divergent histories are placed in casual opposition to each other over a constructed platform, evoking a game board, populated with idiosyncratic pieces. Moves & Countermoves demonstrates how display affects visibility and cultural dissemination, altering the implicit rules determining what is seen and unseen within the Marieluise Hessel Collection. Some of the works chosen from the Marieluise Hessel Collection for Moves & Countermoves include pieces by Janine Antoni, Keith Edmier, Robert Gober, Rachel Harrison, and Robert Mapplethorpe.
The CCS Bard Class of 2015 thesis exhibitions parallel these explorations. Utilizing different selection criteria and display methods, the ten thesis exhibitions obliquely demonstrate curatorial gameplay and how it inherently shifts values within cultural economies. Enacting strategies of exhibition-making, some curatorial practices establish rules, while others reinvent them.
In Moves & Countermoves, the exhibitions investigate what it means to operate in a field that thrives upon the making and breaking of its own rules. Game, set, and match.
Free chartered bus from New York City for the March 29 opening. For reservations call
T +1 845 758 7598, or write ccs [at] bard.edu. The CCS Bard Galleries and Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College are open Thursday through Sunday from 11am to 6pm. All CCS Bard exhibitions and programs are free and open to the public.
The thesis exhibitions are as follows:
Point of Contact
Artists: Gordon Hall, Martin Roth, Naama Tsabar, and Pedro Wirz
Curated by Xavi Acarin
On Sweat, Paper, and Porcelain
Artists: Heman Chong, Ho Rui An, The Propeller Group and Superflex, Andrew Norman Wilson and Akhil C, and Yee I-Lann
Sourced by Kathleen Ditzig
Romancing The Fragment
Artists: Cayetano Ferrer and Avery K. Singer presented with works from the Marieluise Hessel Collection
Curated by Amber J. Esseiva
I’ll be your interface.*
Artists: Dexter Sinister
Organized by Roxana Fabius
Cloud Cover
Artists: Liam Gillick, George Inness, Marina Pinsky, and Rachel Rose
Curated by Lee Foley
Signal from Noise
Artists: Sophia Brueckner, Lev Manovich / Software Studies Initiative, Nyeema Morgan, and Evan Roth
Curated by Elizabeth Larison
Incorporate Me
Artists: The Bernadette Corporation, Maja Cule, Auto Italia (Kate Cooper, Marianne Forrest, Andrew Kerton and Jess Wiesner), Mika Tajima, New Humans, and Artie Vierkant
Curated by Robin Lynch
CCK-4
Artists: Andreas Greiner, Armin Keplinger, Jacob Kirkegaard, and Markus Hoffmann
Curated by Park Myers
Twelve o’clock
Artists: Paul Chan, William Copley, Richard Hawkins, Matthew McCaslin, Dan Miller, David Shrigley, Kiki Smith, Xu Tan, Chen Tong, Lin Yilin, and Zhou Tao
Curated by Wang Jing
Adaptive Permanence
Artists: José León Cerrillo, Harun Farocki, and Daniel Keller
Curated by Natalia Zuluaga
Please visit our website for all related programming.
For more information, please call CCS Bard at T +1 845 758 7598 or write ccs [at] bard.edu.
About the Center for Curatorial Studies
The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (CCS Bard) was founded in 1990 as an exhibition and research center for the study of late 20th-century and contemporary art and culture and to explore experimental approaches to the presentation of these topics and their impact on our world. Since 1994, the Center for Curatorial Studies and its graduate program have provided one of the world’s most forward-thinking teaching and learning environments for the research and practice of contemporary art and curatorship. Broadly interdisciplinary, CCS Bard encourages students, faculty and researchers to question the critical and political dimension of art, its mediation and its social significance. CCS Bard cultivates innovative thinking, radical research and new ways to challenge our understanding of the social and civic values of the visual arts. CCS Bard provides an intensive educational program alongside its public events, exhibitions, and publications, which collectively explore the critical potential of the institutions and practices of exhibition-making. It is uniquely positioned within the larger Center’s tripartite resources, which include the internationally renowned CCS Bard Library and Archives and the Hessel Museum of Art, with its rich permanent collection.
