Introduction Janet Kraynak
Director, MA in Modern and Contemporary Art: Critical and Curatorial Studies, Department of Art History and Archaeology
I am pleased to introduce the 2022 installment of MODA Curates, which takes place each year in the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery in the Lenfest Center for the Arts at Columbia University. MODA Curates plays a key role in the program’s pedagogical approach, providing young scholars and curators with unparalleled opportunities that prepare them for a professional world or future post-graduate study. After a competitive review process, where individual exhibition proposals are assessed for their original approach and relevance to the field, selected students are named as MODA Curatorial Fellows and given the opportunity to mount a professional exhibition, often related to their theses, in a gallery setting. This year, the two MODA Curatorial Fellows––Kojo Abudu and Emily Small––have created timely exhibitions, one thematic and one monographic, which individually examine important developments in contemporary art from the vantage point of differing theoretical and geographical contexts. In close conjunction with the Wallach staff and its Director, Betti-Sue Hertz, the students worked over the course of the academic year on all aspects of the exhibition’s execution: fromorganizing loans to developing installation strategies to preparing their individual catalogue essays. Emily Small’s exhibition, A.K. Burns’ Negative Space: Prepositions of the Future , focuses upon artist A.K. Burns’ multi-year and multi-faceted project, Negative Space . Comprised of photographic, filmic, sculptural and sonic elements, the work draws upon the genre of science-fiction (both in literary and visual terms) to probe the ongoing and accelerating ecological crisis confronting the globe. With precedence in the earthworks and site/non-site installations of artist Robert Smithson from the 1960s–70s, which presciently registered the impacts of capitalism and industrialism upon the land, to the mournful sculptural “stacks” of the 1990s by the late artist Felix Gonzalez- Torres, which rendered the semiotics of loss from the AIDS crisis through acts of sculptural depletion, Burns’ epic looks the past and present of con- temporary culture, probing issues of difference, belonging, and exclusion
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