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Start Making Sense

Research Assistance. 
Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College
22 June–20 October 2024

Start Making Sense brings together highlights from the collections housed at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College; the art collection, Special Collections – part of the CCS Bard library, and the CCS Bard archives. At a moment when the Center is poised to greatly expand its library, archives and classrooms with the new 12,000-square-foot Keith Haring Wing, doubling the size of the library and adding 75% more collection storage below ground (opening in 2025), Start Making Sense creates an open dialogue between artworks and the contexts (exhibitions, institutions, galleries, events, curators, and collectors) which literally “make sense” of the works on display. It does so in a playful dialogue between art objects, archives, ephemera, and rare books held at CCS Bard beginning with the Marieluise Hessel Collection and moving to more recent gifts from a broad range of collectors, curators, artists, and others, who have placed their gifts at the disposition of the students, faculty, and outside researchers, who form the CCS Bard community.

Installation views from Start Making Sense, June 22–October 20, 2024. Hessel Museum of Art, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NYPhoto: Olympia Shannon, 2024.
Glot

 Curator
Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College
6 Apri–26 May 2024

Glot was an exhibition about speech and its limits. 

Taking its title from a classical Greek suffix meaning “to have a tongue,” Glot brought together the work of Shahrzad Changalvaee, JJJJJerome Ellis, Nour Mobarak, and Anri Sala to explore spoken language beyond its signifying function. Although beginning with different concerns, these artists’ practices converged on a central point: difficulty is the grounding condition of speaking together.

What would it mean to consider all the voices gathered in this show — muffled, stuttering, and blocked — as political? Might there be a politics residing in the strange excess of the voice itself, which both carries and disturbs the speaker’s intention? Together, these artists commit to the unresolved utterance over the clear demand, redundancy over lean communication, and all the voice’s snags and frictions over fluent speech

Installation views from Glot, Hessel Museum of Art, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, April 6–May 26, 2024. Master’s thesis exhibition curated by Sophie Rose. Photo: Olympia Shannon 2024.
A Third Language

Curator
Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art
11 February – 9 July 2023
Whenever we translate from one tongue to another, we arrive at a third form of speech that sits somewhere between the two. This exhibition suggested that we all live and speak through a third language: a hybrid mode created through the generative mistranslations between words, cultures, and histories. A Third Language asked what happens when artistic traditions roam, mutate and brush up against one another. Of course, such encounters often occur within the asymmetrical and ongoing relations of colonialism. Rather than expressing any easy or apolitical fusion, the artists in A Third Language reveal how the equivocal, hybrid form also poses a threat to power. 

Artists: Iman Raad, Iatapal Cultural Group, Vunapaka Cultural Group, Mella Jaarsma, Gordon Bennett, Eugene Carchesio, attrib. to Ea Sojay Teshirfios, unknown artists (Ghana), Khadija Saye, Tim Johnson, Savanhdary Vongpoothorn, Gulumbu Yunupingu, Yalpi Yunupingu, Wanyubi Marika, Lincoln Austin, and Baatarzorig Batjargal.


Installation views from A Third Language, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane. 11 February–9 July 2023. Photo: Joe Ruckli and Natasha Harth 


Air

Co-curator with Nina Miall and Geraldine Kirrihi Barlow (lead curator) Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art
26 November 2022–23 April 2023
Air drew together the work of more than 30 significant Australian and international artists over five chapters, giving shape to the invisible and exploring our reliance on this unique mix of gases. Air temperature will be the measure of how we meet the existential challenge of global warming. Following the 2019 exhibition Water, the artists in this exhibition further emphasise that we are living in a critical decade as we rapidly re-engineer our energy systems, societies and structures of care for one another.

Artists: Jananne Al-Ani, Carlos Amorales, Oliver Beer, Dora Budor, Tacita Dean, Max Dupain, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, d Harding with Hayley Matthew, Mona Hatoum, Nancy Holt, Jonathan Jones with Uncle Stan Grant Snr, Ali Kazim, Anthony McCall, Lee Mingwei, Rachel Mounsey,  Ron Mueck, Rei Naito, Albert Namatjira, Jamie North, Charles Page, Katie Paterson, Rosslynd Piggott, Patrick Pound, Lloyd Rees. Tomás Saraceno, Yhonnie Scarce, Wolfgang Sievers, Thu Van Tran, and Jemima Wyman.


Installation views from Air, Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane. 26 November 2022–23 April 2023. Photo: Chloë Callistemon, Merinda Campbell and Joe Ruckli, QAGOMA.


No one is bored

Co-curated with Josefina Barcia, Pallavi Surana and Lili Rebeka Tóth
CCS Bard Galleries
1 –11 December 2022

In the essay “No one is bored; everything is boring,” cultural theorist Mark Fisher describes the ways that new technology has obliterated a boredom particular to the twentieth century, or what he calls Boredom 1.0: “the dreary void of Sundays, the night hours after television stopped broadcasting, even the endless dragging minutes waiting in queues.” Drawing its title from Fisher’s text, the exhibition No one is bored asked how we might recover these small fissures of tedium in the seemingly never-ending cycle of work.

Since the Industrial Revolution, time has functioned as a currency to be saved, carefully spent, and earned back through labor. As an intrusion into the productive day, boredom invites an excess of barren time. Given that each moment of our lives, at work or at home, is a chance to grind, hustle, improve, and produce, this exhibition asked: How does one become truly bored?

Artists: Tina Barney, Anne Collier, Moyra Davey, Kerry Downey, Liam Gillick, On Kawara, Bruce Nauman, Cameron Rowland, and Thomas Struth.

Installation views from From the Collection: First Year Curatorial Practice 2022, CCS Bard Galleries, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, December 1–December 11, 2022. All works from the Marieluise Hessel Collection, curated by the M.A. candidates of the Class of 2024. Photo: Olympia Shannon 2022



Revelations

Curator
Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art
August 2020–July 2022
A display in two parts, Revelations drew comparisons between the development of the printing press in fifteenth-century Europe and the rise of photography in the nineteenth century. These two innovations arose at pivotal historical moments, expanded the distribution of images like never before and drove great social change. 

Part I of this display paid particular attention to the photographs taken by Europeans abroad, at once personal objects and images bound the larger apparatus of European imperialism. Included here were roughly 40 pages from a photo album compiled by a trope of British actors traveling across what is now India, Pakistan and Myanmar from 1899 to 1901. Revelations explored the global circulation of photographs in the nineteenth century, asking who held power in this economy and who did not, and how we might interpret these historical objects today. 

Installation views from Revelations, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane. Permanent International Art display, August 2020 –July 2022. Photo: Natasha Harth, QAGOMA.


Water
Assistant Curator 
Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art
7 December 2019–23 March 2020  Water, in all its states, is one of our planet's most vital elements. From major immersive experiences to smaller-scale treasures by Australian and international artists, Water highlighted this precious resource and aimed to spark conversations on the environmental and social challenges faced by the world today.

Artists: Olafur Eliasson, William Forsythe, Mata Aho Collective, Trevor Paglen, Tomás Saraceno, Julian Charrière, Tacita Dean, Dvid Medalla, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Megan Cope, Nicole Foreshew, Angela Tiatia, Rivane Neuenschwander, Bonita Ely, Cai Guo-Qiang, Paul Blackmore, Patrick Pound, Martina Amati, Judy Watson, Joyce Campbell, Vera Möller, Michael Candy, Dhuwarrwarr Marika, Wukun Wanambi, Yayoi Kusama, Charwei Tsai, Laurence Aberhart, Peter Dombrovskis, Lorraine Connelley-Northey, Lola Greeno, and Ruby Djikarra Alderton. 


Installation views from Water, Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane. 7 December 2019 – 23 March 2020. Photo: Chloë Callistemon, Natasha Harth, and Joe Ruckli, QAGOMA.

Bathroom Gossip

Curator
Boxcopy Art Space
13–27 July 2019
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House is important for architectural modernism—with its radical transparency, open plan and meticulous detailing—but at least some of its fame is gossipy. Mies was rumoured to be sleeping with the client, Dr Edith Farnsworth, and when their friendship soured they sued each other. Mies insisted on two bathrooms for a one-bedroom house, reportedly obsessed that guests might see Farnsworth’s dressing gown. The two bathrooms are separated from the exterior to preserve the continuous glass façade; small, windowless, beige spaces in a house filled with light and natural vistas. There are few blank surfaces to hang art in the house, so the next owner hung his collection in hermetically sealed frames in the shower.

Bathroom Gossip sought to reinstate rumour in architecture. Bringing together the work of architect Hamish Lonergan and artist Charlie Donaldson, the show included a 1:1 model of the left bathroom and (faux) archival material exposing Mies and Farnworth’s relationship and a wider conspiracy to use modernism as a cultural weapon in the Cold War effort. In Lonergan and Donaldson’s alternative account, clean formalism was replaced by messy love affairs; the avant-garde became a guise for nuclear warfare; and direct chronology gave way to tabloid frenzy. 


Installation views from Bathroom Gossip, Boxcopy, Brisbane, 13 – 27 July 2019. Photo: Nicholas Aloisio-Shearer and Sophie Rose