CCS BARD

The strategy of staging remains a dynamic tool for artists to resist entrenched narratives built around power and visibility. Hold the Applause brings together photography, sculpture, video, and painting to consider diverse methods of performing and reenacting representations of the self to navigate ongoing histories of marginalization.

From photographs by Samuel Fosso that fashion identity through playful self-portraiture, to An-My Lê’s documentation of war reenactments in American landscapes, to Deana Lawson’s choreographed depictions of domestic space, the exhibited artists assert lived experience in the face of fixed historical scripts.

Hold the Applause explores the entanglement of the self and the other to interrogate the complex position of the spectator. Here, the stakes of performance shift back onto the viewer to reveal their role within these artistic strategies. Hold the Applause resists the determinism of a completed narrative.

Hold the Applause is curated by Jungmin Cho, Omar Farah, Matthew Lawson Garrett, Ariana Kalliga, and Sibia Sarangan.