This event has been canceled due to CCA’s ongoing response to the evolving COVID–19 outbreak. Please check back at a later date for updates.

“Mark me,” says the Ghost in Shakespeare’s Hamlet when it first reveals its presence to the prince of Denmark, demanding to be heard, to be listened to. This exhibition explores ghosts and specters, focusing on the myriad ways in which they manifest themselves in our lives, claiming our attention or forcing us to take action. As absent presences, ghosts defy categorization—they are elusive, evocative, and performative, blurring the boundaries between real and imaginary. They pull us into a liminal zone, unsettling the boundaries between life-death, visibility-invisibility, materiality-immateriality, human-nonhuman. They uncover our secrets and repressed memories from the past, and offer enthralling possibilities for a non-linear understanding of time, where past-present-future fold into each other. In today’s culture, we encounter ghosts not only in haunted, abandoned places, but also in our machines as images—from cinema screens to VR, from computers to smartphones. The images that populate our screens mark the absence of an embodied presence, false and yet hyperreal—“more real than real.” This exhibition will feature work by current Graduate Fine Arts students whose work explores ghosts, specters, and apparitions in diverse forms. Our focus on “the ghost” dovetails with a constellation of other concepts/metaphors, such as the intricacies of memory and trauma; the effects of scientific processes, technologies, and media; and the issues of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and class.

Curated by Nilgun Bayraktar (Visual Studies, Film) and Tino Gonzales (Grad Fine Arts).

Image: Tino Gonzales, "Beacon Sketch"