THE VISITOR TALKS – WE ARE THE CENTER FOR CURATORIAL STUDIES: THE DEPARTMENT OF EVENTS (THE DISCURSIVE CORE)

Wednesday, October 12, 5:00 – 7:00 PM

We are delighted you will take part in the exhibition project We are the Center for Curatorial Studies, as one of our invited artists. As part of this exhibition, we invite you to contribute towards this coming semester’s Visitor Talks program. Taking place within the framework of We are the Center for Curatorial Studies, this is a series of public and semi-public events, lectures, discussions, and presentations about ‘the curatorial’ – what it means as an object of study, and what it means to be a center or epicenter for such study. These talks will help define our Department of Events, forming the discursive core of the Center for the semester.

As well as coming to talk with us, we hope you will make use of our resources: the museum, the archive, the library, the classroom, and the graduate program, with its faculty, staff and students. Ideally, we would like to begin an on-going dialogue with you, with your work, and with the presentation of this work. We want to study the form(s) of labor involved in your work, and what it is doing in the world. We want to look hard at what it is that is being exhibited – to explore its materiality, to live with it, and to question its ‘curiatorial-ity’. Your artwork presents a means of questioning our own curatorial and educational work.

We are using We are the Center for Curatorial Studies as a way to reflect upon the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard), whilst building it in exhibition form. Integral to an expanded conception of the curatorial is recognition of the exhibition itself as a potential mode of research action. As part of this process, we are considering what kind of things, images, information, display structures, events, discussions, archives, attention, temporalities, works, and practices should make up the Center for Curatorial Studies. We hope you will come to share your thoughts with us, and will take our invitation as a framing device for the content of your talk. What would you include in the Center for Curatorial Studies? What would be contained within it? What would make up its core – its focus of study and of exhibition?

We are looking forward to seeing you and hosting you soon at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, and to hearing your thoughts.

Warmest wishes,

Paul O’Neill

Director of the Graduate Program