Tenderly Kept: Publicly Narrating Private Objects

Contributors: Arvind Garg, Austin Clay Willis, Budhaditya Chowdhury, Daniela Angelo, David X Levine, Gabriela Valentin, Hajra Sana, Kushan Bhattacharya, MA Interaction Design, Manuel Mata, Oorja Garg, Paola Pomarico, Payal Arya, Printed Matter, Tsohil Bhatia. 

Curated by Abbas A Malakar

MA Curatorial Practice at the School of Visual Arts is pleased to present Tenderly Kept: an exhibition at the convergence of material culture, oral histories, and fine arts. You have something in your room that no one else will ever relate to. Whatever story it has can be heard and understood, but never truly felt. It belongs to you not only physically but is bound to you spiritually. It is valuable beyond an economic denomination. It is important beyond justifiable explanations. You know it. You feel it. It is a vessel for something that originated from deep within you, in your memories, in your lived experiences, through your actions with it or around it. It is an inalienable extension of you and your identity. You are not alone. We invite you to join our exploration and find what matters to you within the secret realms of private possessions. Our objects might inspire you to share your own stories. 

Walking Onward, Staring Below 

Artists: Daniel Blanco, Juliana Góngora, Julianne Swartz, Gema Rupérez, Ícaro Zorbár, Juan David Figueroa.

Curated by Daniela Marín Aristizábal 

The MA Curatorial Practice program at the School of Visual Arts is pleased to present Walking Onward, Staring Below, curated by Daniela Marín Aristizábal. The exhibition brings together artists whose works examines natural processes, mechanisms, and behaviors that have evolved in harmony over millennia. Through delicate symbolic gestures and humble materials, the exhibition reflects on core human qualities—empathy, resilience, awareness, and hope—while questioning the separation humanity has created with the natural world. By engaging with systems beyond their personal experience, the artists reveal the quiet yet powerful forces that sustain all forms of life.

Harnessing the power of metaphor, Walking Onward, Staring Below explores the intersections of human perception and the intricate systems that shape existence. Using soft technologies, poetic gestures, and subtle interventions, the artists create a reflective space that challenges conventional perspectives about possible futures. The exhibtion invites viewers to reconsider their relationship with the world, fostering a deeper sense of connection, respect, and possibility.

AQuÍ TE esPERO

Artists: Andina Marie Osorio, Eros Dibra, Bianka Rolando, Lev Pinkus, The Unsent Project (Rora Blue)

Curated by Gabriela Valentín

The MA Curatorial Practice program at the School of Visual Arts is pleased to present Aquí Te Espero, curated by Gabriela Valentín. This exhibition is a pause—an inhalation held between presence and absence, between what was and what remains. It lingers in the spaces where words were once spoken and in the silences that followed. Aquí Te Espero is not about urgency but the weight of waiting, the quiet resilience of love that does not demand immediate reciprocation. Through photography, text, installations, and video, the artists explore the act of holding space for one another, the invisible threads that connect us beyond time and certainty. To wait is to believe in return or, at least, in the echo of what once was.

Radial Minds

Artists: Natalia Mejia Murillo, Raqs Media Collective, Weina Li

Curated by Oorja 

How do we imagine the Alien? Is it a distant Other, or does it demand a radical shift in perspective? The MA Curatorial Practice program at the School of Visual Arts is pleased to present Radial Minds, curated by Oorja. The exhibition is a speculative space where thought experiments unsettle fixed ideas about life, knowledge, and existence, urging audiences to leave with more questions than answers. At its core, the exhibition blurs the boundaries between disciplines, merging scientific inquiry and artistic speculation. It interrogates the extractive logics of space exploration, mirroring how non-human life is treated on Earth, and it combines planetary sciences, astrobiology, and speculative philosophy to rethink how we define life and habitability. To suggest a different way of looking at the planet, the exhibition proposes radial or pentapodal thinking, inspired by Donna Haraway’s sympoiesis (“making-with”), which rejects binaries in favor of tentacular, multidirectional knowledge systems. Can we rethink habitability beyond human-centered narratives? What if we are the Alien? This is not a vision of conquest, but of co-existence, entanglement, and planetary becoming.

Mirological: The Poetics of Mourning

Artists: Jean Marie Casbarian, Leonardo Madriz, Liliana Merizalde, Nikolay Karabinovych
Curated by Sophia Maria Takvorian

Mirological: The Poetics of Mourning explores this tender and elegiacal subject through the works of artists who have contended with the loss of loved ones, and the consequent sense of self, home, history, and potential futures. Drawing inspiration from mirologia, Greek lamentation songs, the exhibition adopts this colloquial term to describe collective processes of grief and the ways in which artists mold their mourning through their practices. The works on view embody notions of vulnerability, catharsis, and adaptation in the face of loss, and trace notions of collective and individual identity in the shadow of grief and of a society that not only dictates how we must live but also how we must mourn.

Yes, And

Artists: Addam Yekutieli (Know Hope), Alicia Mersy, Jonas Lund, Nancy Holt & Robert Smithson, Tora Schultz, Unga

Curated by Tom Koren

The MA Curatorial Practice program at the School of Visual Arts is pleased to present Yes, And, curated by Tom Koren. Yes, And is a group exhibition that takes its cue from the binary frameworks that shape contemporary politics, exploring the possibilities or limitations that arise from the attempt to hold multiple—and sometimes contradictory—truths. Through the work of six artists working across diverse mediums, the exhibition offers a critical reflection on processes of ideological adherence and tribalist allegiance, particularly in light of the deepening polarization and crisis of communication that prevail in the digital age. In mirroring and complicating the dichotomies that underlie social conflict, Yes, And sheds light on the ways in which politics of division are employed as strategies of control, asking whether it is possible to resist these divides without blurring differences or promoting neutrality.