The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard) will present graduate thesis exhibitions organized by the Class of 2025. Collectively entitled 15, the projects point, in the students’ words, “to a deep engagement with histories that reverberate back and forth in time to critically reimagine the present.” 15 will be on view at CCS Bard’s Hessel Museum of Art through May 25, 2025.
The graduate exhibition is a core component of CCS Bard’s master’s program, which offers each student the opportunity to organize an independent project involving new commissions, original research into artists’ practices, and engagement with CCS Bard’s extensive archives and the Marieluise Hessel Collection. Past student-curated exhibitions have served as springboards for artists in the earliest stages of their careers, deep scholarship into historic movements and tendencies, and as the basis for ongoing curatorial investigations by CCS Bard graduates at other leading museums, galleries, and arts organizations around the world.
Representing individual curatorial concerns and strategies, this year’s projects range from exhibitions that explore digital dystopias, media circulation, competing histories and memory, and underrepresented artists and archives.
gap gap gap / گپ گپ گپ
How do photographs condition our perceptions of the self, family, and community? gap gap gap / گپ گپ گپ brings together three contemporary Afghan artists who refigure personal, everyday photos through the slow, careful process of needlework. Transformed by time and scale, their resulting works—situated at the intersection of photography and fiber art—monumentalize the careful, demanding process of suturing relationships that have ruptured in the aftermath of displacement.
Featured artists: Hangama Amiri, Latifa Zafar Attaii, Zelikha Zohra Shoja
Curated by Zuhra Amini
Press release from Hessel Museum of Art
Image: Zelikha Zohra Shoja. dest e doost. 2023. Detail. Archival photographs printed on organza and cotton textiles. Image courtesy of the artist
