In A Room Anything Can Happen
The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College
March 17 – May 24 2009
Eight curators check into a museum. They do not know what to expect but they would rather not share one room. Each would like their own key, but in sharing one space they create an exhibition which is both collective and autonomous. Hotels provide temporary lodging for travellers setting out into the world; the museum is a world on display. The objects in the museum are extracted from the world, suggesting many possible travels while the hotel room is a point of departure for both actual and imaginary adventures: in a room anything can happen.
The invitation to curate a museum collection that you do not know is comparable to checking into a hotel in a foreign country. The general routine seems vaguely familiar while the works themselves remain elusive.
Considering museums and hotels modern institutions which came of age during the Nineteenth Century when the concept of public space entered into social conscious-ness. The hotel offers depersonalised privacy in public while the museum allows a personal encounter with objects in the midst of the public realm. They both are stationary pursuits offering transitory experiences which break the routine of the everyday.
The concatenation of rooms in the Hessel Museum, one after the other will offer the visitor glimpses of the private relationship between the eight hotel dwellers and the Marieluise Hessel collection.
The transient space of the museum-hotel, suggests a point of departure and a destina-tion of many journeys. Mona Hatoum’s I Am Still Here, shows the impossibility to travel from one’s self, Martin Creed’s Feelings, a constant voyage through ephemeral states of being, Orozco’s Paris-New York 30 January 1997, graphite and gouache on boarding pass. Nauman’s Bouncing in the Corner an expedition in new media, all passing through the walls of display.
In A Room Anything Can Happen is not a travelling show but a show to travel.