Artists' talk with Michael Beutler, Esra Ersen, and Kirstine Roepstorff

The three artists will participate in the CCS Galleries summer show 2008 entitled
Personal Protocols and Other Preferences. Michael Beutler (Berlin) makes work that reacts to exhibition spaces' architectonic conditions. The machines he builds from recycled materials create playful possibilities for action. Beutler's art is about devices,
gimmicks, and ways of killing time as an attempt to solve practical problems--including economic problems.

Several of Esra Ersen's (Istanbul/Berlin) works involve various languages and social boundaries, thematizing complications of cultural exchange. Her work is rich in staged situations in which negotiations involving her own experience as a woman from Turkey are crucial and are placed in relief to Western culture and its expectations of "the other."

Kirstine Roepstorff (Copenhagen/Berlin) excels in creating large-scale collages reminiscent of textiles and full of intricate details from varying contexts. With her method, which she calls "appropriarranging," she dissolves one context in order to create a new one. In the works Amnat and Satsit and Zarema, she refers to the first names of three Chechen "black widows," i.e., female suicide bombers who experienced personal absence and loss with strong psychosocial aspects.

Time: 11:00 am – 12:00 pm
Location: CCS Bard Seminar Room 1
Contact: 845-758-7598
E-mail: ccs@bard.edu