Moda Curates 2026

Each year, two outstanding proposals from the Columbia University MA in Modern and Contemporary Art: Critical and Curatorial Studies program are selected for exhibition at Wallach Art Gallery during its “MODA Curates” series.

Skins, Not Our Own, curated by Summer Jimin Park

The skin is intimate and exposed at once. Even as it envelops the body and connects to internal organs, it remains external, open to the world as a threshold where the self meets other. Skins, Not Our Own begins from this paradox. What does skin retain? Where does it begin, and where does it end? What happens when the body’s outermost layer is peeled away, stretched, or displaced and becomes a material in its own right? The exhibition brings together three artists––Heidi Bucher, Rebecca Horn, and Kimsooja—each of whom brings the body’s surface to the fore.

Mapping Otherwise, curated by Katherine Duxiaole Zhang

Mapping Otherwise situates the 1947 Partition of South Asia within this broader history of border-making and its afterlives. The line dividing India and Pakistan—drawn amid decolonization—stands as one of many moments when the map’s abstract marks remade lived worlds. The line’s enduring presence, contested and reimagined, carries metaphorical force far beyond the subcontinent: it crystallizes how modern statehood is founded on both separation and longing. Through their respective work, artists Zarina Hashmi (b. Aligarh, India, 1937–2020) and Naiza Khan (b. Bahawalpur, Pakistan, 1968) explore what it means to inhabit and reimagine those lines.