ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, NY.- This summer, CCS Bard invites visitors to experience the galleries in entirely new ways with new exhibitions. Personal Protocols and Other Preferences: A Collective Exhibition with Work by Michael Beutler, Esra Ersen, and Kirstine Roepstorff will be on view in the CCS Bard Galleries.

For Personal Protocols and Other Preferences: A Collective Exhibition with Work by Michael Beutler, Esra Ersen, and Kirstine Roepstorff, three Berlin-based artists have worked on site making art that engages intensively with situations marked by the reality of particular times and places. Michael Beutler has invented an ingenious system to produce nine-foot-tall walls made of colorful paper. The new walls radically alter the experience of the pristine white cube gallery space, in which Esra Ersen, originally from Istanbul, is showing an engaging documentary video with street children in her hometown. Ersen is also showing a film following the radical makeover of Helen, an elderly woman and longtime resident of Liverpool, a city that is undergoing major urban transformation. Kirstine Roepstorff’s textile-like collages, some of which are made directly on the wall, can partly be viewed from a tower constructed by her colleague Michael Beutler.

There is a crafty aspect to the work Personal Protocols and Other Preferences, which takes do-it-yourself techniques seriously as a way of questioning what is standard, whether it is man-made machines, videos filmed with a handheld camera, or textile-like collages. Although the physical outcomes are radically different, all three of these artists strictly follow their own personal protocols of production. Wanting to challenge the neutral look of the bare CCS Bard Galleries, the artists decided to think about the exhibition as a “collective exhibition” rather than a normal group exhibition. In other words, in a common endeavor a number of decisions would be made collectively, particularly those pertaining to the installation. Personal Protocols and Other Preferences is curated by Maria Lind.

The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (CCS Bard) is an art and research center dedicated to the study of art and curatorial practices from the 1960s to the present day. The Center’s graduate program is specifically designed to deepen students’ understanding of the intellectual and practical tasks of curating exhibitions of contemporary art. With more than 9,500 square feet of gallery space and an extensive library and curatorial archive, CCS Bard offers students intellectual grounding and actual experience within a museum.

In November 2006, CCS Bard inaugurated the Hessel Museum of Art, a new 17,000-square-foot building for exhibitions curated from the Marieluise Hessel Collection of more than 1,700 contemporary works. The new museum features intimate rooms encircling two large central galleries, and is scaled so that approximately 10 to 15 percent of the collection can be shown at any one time. The Hessel Museum extends the reach of the CCS Bard exhibition program, providing a place to test out the possibilities for exhibition making, using the remarkable resources of the collection as a whole.