(ANNANDALE-on-HUDSON, N.Y.) – Moves & Countermoves, eleven exhibitions and projects curated by second-year students in the graduate program in curatorial studies and contemporary art in the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (CCS Bard), will be on view from Sunday, March 29, 2015, to May 3, 2015, with an opening reception taking place on Sunday, March 29 from 1 to 4pm. 
The exhibition 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 ‘sleight 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.

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 public programs are free and open to the public.

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 twentieth-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.