Spring 2017
Center for Curatorial Studies
Bard College
PO Box 5000
Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504-5000
T 845 758 7598
[email protected]
Dearest Visitor,
We are delighted you will be part of our Visitor Talks program “You talkin’ to me?” As part of this semester’s talks, we would like you to think about discursive practice and the agency of the addressee, and to reflect upon whom we speak to when we are working, speaking, or exhibiting. In accounting for essential inclusion of the other, the viewer, the public, these Visitor Talks extend the importance of speaking-as-doing-as-discursive practice crucial to We are the Center for Curatorial Studies—a multi-year exhibition and research program incorporating talks, artist projects, exhibitions, collaborations—as an evolving exhibition gathering its form through a deep consideration of the spaces of juxtaposition between subjects, things, images, words, structures, and/or display.
We hope you will consider “the discursive” as a starting point to think of different modes of address, speculative approaches, or propositional means to enunciate ourselves. Put simply, for whom do we exhibit? From where do we speak when we exhibit the curatorial? What does it actually mean to be a subject being addressed within a space? What does it mean to imply that it has a center or epicenter for such curatorial invocations? Equally, what does it mean to be outside, marginal or beyond such a center?
As well as coming to talk with us, we hope you will spend some time with us, and to make use of our resources: the museum, the archive, the library, the classroom, and the graduate program, with its faculty, staff, and students. We want to study the form(s) and modes of address in your work, and what it is you think it is actively addressing in the world. We want to listen to what it is that is being exhibited when we speak of the curatorial, the discursive, and when we speak through our practice, and to whom we are addressing when we speak or when we “speak ourselves” in the world?
We are the Center for Curatorial Studies is a means to reflect upon curatorial studies and to extend a conception of the curatorial to account for multiple sites of contact, assemblages and gathering of diverse bodies and subjects as well as their discursive connections. In doing so, it opens up a concept of the formation of the “exhibition” itself as a potential mode of research action in its own process of becoming.
We are looking forward to seeing you soon, and to hearing your thoughts.
Warmest wishes,
Paul O’Neill Director of the Graduate Program
The Visitor Talks are held at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Classroom 102, 5–7pm. All are free and open to the public.
Schedule of Visitors this spring are as follows:
Wednesday, March 15: Sara Cwynar
Wednesday, March 29: Tania Bruguera
Wednesday, April 5: Carlos Motta
Wednesday, April 12: Milena Hoegsberg
Monday, April 24: Celine Condorelli
Previous speakers can be viewed here.
