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Neuberger Museum of Art

Hard Return: Daniel Bozhkov

Through an intensive involvement with soil science and cucumbers, Daniel Bozhkov’s Cosmic Cucumber Carousel investigates the viability of life on Earth and other planets. 

About Cosmic Cucumber Carousel

With this new commission, Daniel Bozhkov proposes to grow cucumbers on Mars. In the gallery, his project takes the form of a five-day-long opera. This is an opera in the expanded sense of the word – a musical play and theatrical performance, but also a work, an act of labor, care, and trouble.

For Cosmic Cucumber Carousel, Bozhkov has collaborated with the composer and vocalist Erin Gee to create a five-day opera that embodies a year’s work with gardeners in Bulgaria, soil biogeochemists, and astro-ecologists at Cornell University and The Soil Factory in Ithaca, New York. A cycle of videos features scientists, fortune tellers, and gardeners making disparate predictions about the fate of the project, as well as Bozhkov and Gee as cantors speculating on the viability of life on this and other planets. Alongside these videos, an assortment of pickled cucumbers—some experimentally grown in simulated Martian soil—and fresco panels frame a group of Purchase College students who perform a one-minute composition by Gee on the hour while wearing garments designed by Bozhkov and Kiwi Phong Nguyen. Another group of students continually embroiders a large curtain that doubles as mise-en-scène and chronicle. Bozhkov’s work asks us to imagine multiple futures—and how our actions in the present make some versions more possible than others.

Daniel Bozhkov, Cosmic Cucumber Carousel, in Hard Return

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    Daniel Bozhkov’s Cosmic Cucumber Carousel in Hard Return

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    Daniel Bozhkov’s Cosmic Cucumber Carousel in Hard Return

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    Daniel Bozhkov’s Cosmic Cucumber Carousel in Hard Return

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    Daniel Bozhkov’s Cosmic Cucumber Carousel in Hard Return

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    Daniel Bozhkov’s Cosmic Cucumber Carousel in Hard Return

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    Daniel Bozhkov’s Cosmic Cucumber Carousel in Hard Return

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    Daniel Bozhkov’s Cosmic Cucumber Carousel in Hard Return

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    Daniel Bozhkov’s Cosmic Cucumber Carousel in Hard Return

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    Daniel Bozhkov’s Cosmic Cucumber Carousel in Hard Return

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    Daniel Bozhkov’s Cosmic Cucumber Carousel in Hard Return

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    Daniel Bozhkov’s Cosmic Cucumber Carousel in Hard Return

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    Daniel Bozhkov’s Cosmic Cucumber Carousel in Hard Return

Over the course of nine weeks from February through May, Hard Return: 9 Experiments for this Moment will transform the Neuberger Museum of Art into a site of collaboration, investigation, and performance art. Nine artists have been commissioned to create diverse, participatory, durational week-long projects that experiment with a sense of being alive in this moment while probing the influence of history on the present, proposing different ways of shaping and understanding community.

Hard Return: 9 Experiments for this Moment is organized by the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, SUNY, and co-curated by Purchase College faculty members Kate Gilmore, a renowned performance artist, and Jonah Westerman, an art historian who specializes in performance art.

Generous financial support for this exhibition has been provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Friends of the Neuberger Museum of Art, and the Purchase College Foundation. Additional support of the student participation in Hard Return has been provided by Ivan Bart & Grant Greenberg and Ava & Paul Zukowsky.

Related Event: Artist Talk

A Conversation About “Hard Return: 9 Experiments for this Moment”

April 11, 2023 | 6:30pm | Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture