Living Under The Same Roof: The Marieluise Hessel Collection and the Center for Curatorial Studies is the result of an intensive research and teaching program organized by Ana Paula Cohen during her time as Curator-in-Residence at the Center for Curatorial Studies. Each year the Center invites an outside curator to work with our graduate students to investigate the Marieluise Hessel Collection and consider how to create an exhibition within the galleries of the Hessel Museum of Art. Ana Paula Cohen has proposed less an exhibition and more a process through which the scope of the collection is brought out into the open for the public to examine; in turn, this process grants the public direct access to the works themselves. Over a series of months, the museum will in effect become a laboratory in which anyone may participate. It is a simple, yet radical, move that up-ends the often closed systems within which the public encounters art within the context of the museum. In essence, Cohen has brought the more than 2,000 artworks, artist books, videos, and films out of storage, providing a platform to explore how we can “activate” the collection.
The exhibition presents a mapping of the entire collection – developed in collaboration with Paris-based Brazilian artists Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain – in an attempt to open up, to an interested audience, the idea of the collection as a system with variable entrances. The public is invited to select works from storage to be seen in a viewing room in the museum space. The works will be displayed in a rotating system according to weekly requests. The exhibition also focuses on two sub-collections: the artists’ books (including works by Marcel Broodthaers, Joseph Kosuth, Robert Smithson, Stephen Shore, Matt Mullican, and Rosangela Rennó) and the time-based media works (film, video, or audio works by artists such as Joan Jonas, Nancy Holt, and Christian Marclay). The intention is to understand the specificities of these other areas of the collection and to emphasize their importance within the Hessel Museum structure. The display of Living Under the Same Roof functions as an apparatus articulating the dynamics of each part of the exhibition and its relation to the audience. The structures were developed in collaboration with Bogota-based artist Gabriel Sierra, in order to accommodate both the artworks and the public, according to the specific use of each space.
Related Programming
Conference:
About Particularities: How To Collect and Display Artistic Practices in Contemporary Art Museums?
A one-day conference with the participation of Jan Debbaut, Marysia Lewandowska, and Cecilia Widenheim, Hessel Museum of Art, Center for Curatorial Studies
February 20, 3-5p.m.
The starting point for the project Living Under the Same Roof is an investigation of the mechanisms that constitute any museum collection as a system, and the way each collection functions according to its own idiosyncratic logic. This project takes the Marieluise Hessel Collection as a specific object of study, rendering its structure and its artworks accessible to an interested audience. The conference “About particularities” will expand this examination with reference to the specific collection and display practices at other contemporary art museums, such as the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Tate Modern in London and the The Pontus Hultén Study Gallery at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm. What does it mean to classify and physically organize a collection of contemporary art? How to create an acquisition policy that reflects the current program of the museum? How do contemporary artists engage with this issue, and how are new platforms created to organize and present practices that result in production beyond the discrete object?
Limited free seating is available on a chartered bus that leaves from New York City for the February 20 opening. The bus returns to New York City after the opening. Reservations are required; call 845.758.7598 or email ccs@bard.edu.
