Hold The Applause
(co-curated with Jungmin Cho, Matthew Lawson Garrett, Ariana Kalliga, and Sibia Sarangan)
The strategy of staging remains a dynamic tool for artists to resist entrenched narratives built around power and visibility. Hold the Applause brings together photography, sculpture, video, and painting to consider diverse methods of performing and reenacting representations of the self to navigate ongoing histories of marginalization.
From photographs by Samuel Fosso that fashion identity through playful self-portraiture, to An-My Lê’s documentation of war reenactments in American landscapes, to Deana Lawson’s choreographed depictions of domestic space, the exhibited artists assert lived experience in the face of fixed historical scripts.
Hold the Applause explores the entanglement of the self and the other to interrogate the complex position of the spectator. Here, the stakes of performance shift back onto the viewer to reveal their role within these artistic strategies. Hold the Applause resists the determinism of a completed narrative.
Diedrick Brackens, Donna Dennis, Samuel Fosso, Deana Lawson, An-My Lê, Rodney McMillian, Salman Toor, and Kara Walker
Presented at the Hessel Museum of Art, CCS Bard Galleries, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, December 7 – December 17, 2023.
Installation views from From the Collection: First Year Curatorial Practice 2023, CCS Bard Galleries, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, December 7 – December 17, 2023.
All works from the Marieluise Hessel Collection, curated by the M.A. candidates of the Class of 2025.
Photo: Olympia Shannon 2023.
All works from the Marieluise Hessel Collection, curated by the M.A. candidates of the Class of 2025.
Photo: Olympia Shannon 2023.