Exhibition

Presenting the final curatorial projects from MA Curatorial Practice fellows. Exhibitions will be on view in-person and online. Check this page for updates.

The Holder, The Story

Curated by Bella Anastasio

Pfizer Building, Brooklyn, and online at www.theholder-thestory.com

Storytelling is an interface for translating and harboring experience, as well as a tool by which to measure and understand ourselves in the world. Stories ground the way we make sense of life, but can also limit our understanding of what life can be. “The Holder, The Story” presents works by Julie Bena, Julia Haft Candell, Moko Fukuyama, Melissa Lohman, Adeola Olakiitan and Maria Duran Sampedro that explore what has been lost and what stands to be gained through storytelling traditions that often measure worth and humanity according to violence and achievement. Some works in “The Holder, The Story” reveal the consequences of these traditions, while others investigate the potential role of storytellers as nurturing healers for collective and individual psyches. What do we inherit from storytelling traditions? And how might we be an expansive link in a narrative chain?

what’s ur handle?

Curated by Angelica Fuentes

Pfizer Building, Brooklyn

To schedule a viewing, please email 1angelicafuentes@gmail.com.

“what’s ur handle?” explores online avatars as a tool of resistance. Figurative oil painter Emma Stern’s sexually empowered subjects are extended self-portraits who exercise liberation in the form of an avatar translated to paint. Interdisciplinary media artist Fabiola Larios uses social media selfie filters to declare autonomy over one’s own internet persona. Multimedia artist Emily Mulenga presents Bunniana, an overtly sexualized human-bunny avatar used to navigate digital spaces idealizing femininity. Interdisciplinary artist Lena Chen presents the Internet from the perspective of sex workers who navigate a digital environment full of harassment, discrimination and manipulation. Health-tech-politics practitioner and artist Tabita Rezaire’s video work celebrates spiritual knowledges and the empowerment of Black femmes as a means of opposing discrimination and stereotyping online. These artists create alternate personas, avatars and sometimes entire worlds to combat the way female bodies are valued in digital realms, and how female representations affect gender performativity in real life.

Queerisphere 

Curated by David Hanlon

Pfizer Building, Brooklyn, and online at queerisphere.com

“Queerisphere” is about queer performance and its recent shift to online platforms. Such platforms have enabled the formation of entirely new communities, as well as forms of support that have become increasingly rare in physical spaces due to rising gentrification, and more recently the COVID-19 pandemic. The exhibition features works created and performed on social media platforms by Patrick Arias, Seth Sanker, Julian Burzynski, Adeola Olakiitan and Alfredo Aguayo, with a live event sponsored by Club Quarantine on Zoom, a drag performance by New York queen Neon Calypso, an interview with Coco Deville, and various other performances, as well as an online component at queerisphere.com.

In the Shape of a Square

Curated by Clifford Loh

May 7 – 15, 2021

“In the Shape of a Square” is a series of temporary site-specific interventions around New York City that attempts to trace the contours of social relations in public space. Envisioning the curatorial as an infrastructural method, works by Post Museum (Singapore), Super Critical Mass (Australia/United States) and Eating in Public (United States) serve as open proposals to the public and will unfold organically and in a manner that is not predetermined. In a time of global political and social uncertainty, during which COVID-19 precautionary measures continue to limit intimacy and direct exchange, “In the Shape of a Square” speaks to human vulnerability and the effects of the virus on both a personal and global scale. What is art’s capacity to activate a democratic effect in the complex composite situation of public space, to produce space while questioning its becoming?

Fetch the Bolt Cutters 

Curated by Adeola Olakiitan

Online at ftbc.space



Digital Publication I: Tuesday, April 14

Digital Publication II: Wednesday, April 28

Digital Publication III: Wednesday, May 12

Hypercapitalism, as a more advanced form of late capitalism, continues to reveal its reliance on various forms of oppression and myth to sustain its excessive extraction and escalating plunder. Liberation, however, beckons at the other end of its sweeping dominion through long years of committed resistance and envisioning equitable futures. “Fetch the Bolt Cutters” is a counter-capitalist project (dreamwork) that stands in this constellation as a serial participatory installation and digital publication project to counter and inspire a more desirable here and now. Featuring artists and collectives Institute of Queer Ecology, Spiral Theory Test Kitchen, Internet Teapot, Bare Minimum Collective and Vicious Collective, among others, the project maps ideas, instructional artworks and materials that negate and illuminate newer articulations for immediate alternatives to life under hypercapitalism.

Of Decadence and Decay

Curated by Marley C. Smit

Pfizer Building, Brooklyn

To schedule a viewing, please email msmit@sva.edu.

“Of Decadence and Decay” is a group exhibition of works that employ craft, kitsch and camp to reveal the innately grotesque nature of amassing extreme wealth and all its trappings in the era of late capitalism. The COVID-19 pandemic has illuminated the morbid effects of class disparity in America perpetuated by colonial, capitalist, racist and patriarchal systems. Although capitalism tends to suck everything up into its vortex, even efforts to undermine it, “Of Decadence and Decay” leans into this contradiction, while asking how craft and kitsch art can undermine classist hierarchies and illuminate pathways towards more ethical models of valuation. By remaining complicit in the capitalist mechanism that elevates anything canonized as “fine art” to an exalted status, the exhibition brings together works by Hilliary Gabryel, Christina Nicodema, Kat Ryals and Rachael Tarravechia that together contribute to kitsch and craft art’s history of undercutting the socially constructed disparities between “high” and “low” material, inviting inquiry into other normalized oppressive systems of determining value.

We, Land 

Curated by Yuan (Sylvia) Zhi 

On view from April 16 – 21, 2021

Opening Reception: Friday, April 16, 5:00 – 7:00 pm (Hong Kong Time) 

W36 Art Space, 199 Guangzhou Street, 2nd floor, Gulou District, Nanjing, China

Tuesday – Sunday, 10:00am – 5:00pm

A city is a mirror beckoning us to consider its vast opacity—the complex lives behind endless concrete and stone, the constrained streets below towering vertices, the oceans of data transmitted through the Internet. Focusing on the word “we,” the exhibition “We, Land” brings together works by Cecilia Kim, Okui Lala, Cena Lu, Ningxin Li, Ziyang Wu, Yiding Zhang and Daiqing Zhu to explore hidden narratives of the city. How do personal influences shape our perceptions of place, and how do the places we occupy reflect our selves? And what is behind this reflection? Though the city continuously absorbs memories and redefines itself, it also mourns the impossibility of returning to an enchanted world that preceded it, whether as a secular expression of spiritual need, a nostalgia for absolutes or a longing for the Edenic unity of time and space before the city gained entry into history.

Do-Until Loop Parade

Curated by Ash Cortes, Katelynn Dunn, Emma Gasterland Gustafsson, Tamara Khasanova, Carina Martinez, Yuan Shi, Zezhou Wang, and Kevin Wu, with Exhibition Practicum instructor Noam Segal

Virtual gallery presentations will take place April 21 – 23, 2021, 5:00 – 7:00pm ET.

RSVP by sending a note of interest to macp2022.sva@gmail.com.

“Do-Until Loop Parade” is an exhibition in a box inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s Boîte en Valise (1935–41). Artworks featured in this show hint at the existence of “loops” that have long dictated our psychological, socioeconomic and political freedoms. These loops are constructs—systems of control—but their origins and logics are obscured. Nonetheless, their effects on our lives are palpable.

The exhibition brings together selected works from the SVA MFA Photography, Video and Related Media program’s class of 2020, which have been selected by their relevance to ideas of cyclicality and isolation. The artworks reflect on the mobility and stagnancy of our contemporary experience. Hyemi Kim’s City Collage (2019) video presents collaged situations, environments, objects and processes that invite viewers to think beyond the bounds of reality. Po Han Huang’s postcards from his Reverberation of Memory (2020) installation represent a mnemonic of the past, meant to fuse with the present as the audience interacts with images of the infinite. Fernando Sancho’s A Highrise Laundry Room (2019) film invites understanding to invisible extensions of care from one community of immigrants to their employment in the residences of a high-rise apartment building on the Upper West Side. Weihan Zhou’s Chair (2020) and Moththth (2020) films inspire recollection of uncanny memories constructed through an analogue animation of a woman falling in a chair, and a story of encountering a moth within one’s home. Yi Hsuan Lai’s Hand in Hand (2020) sculptures made out of Sculpey clay induce fantasies of escape through falsifying the body’s restrictions to time and space. Lingfei Ren’s 2D, 4D, 6D, 7D (2019) photo sculpture investigates multi-spatial, multi-temporal environments by creating visual compressions of urban domesticity caught between the personal and generic. Jinglin Wang’s 24 Hours Older (2020) gif asks us to imagine the limits of the corporeal form and beauty of time as inescapable.