MOVES & COUNTERMOVES
Center for Curatorial Studies and Hessel Museum of Art
March 29-May 3, 2015
Opening: Sunday, March 29, 1– 4pm
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.
http://www.bard.edu/ccs/exhibitions/moves-countermoves/
