BAK – basis voor actuele kunst

Program

Exhibition

09 September–29 October 2023

To Watch the War: The Moving Image Amidst the Invasion of Ukraine (2014–2023)

To Watch the War: The Moving Image Amidst the Invasion of Ukraine (2014–2023) is a moving image forum which takes place at BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht from 9 September to 29 October 2023. It is convened from within the experimental film and video making that has emerged in direct response to the Russian war on Ukraine that began with Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and which continues to date as a full-scale invasion.

Propositions for Non-Fascist Living

Public Program

09 September–29 October 2023

To Watch the War: The Moving Image Amidst the Invasion of Ukraine (2014–2023)/Public Program

To Watch the War: The Moving Image Amidst the Invasion of Ukraine (2014–2023) involves a hybrid off- and online sequence of conversations and screenings around discursive and artistic interventions that reimagine the social implications of watching the war through ways that disrupt, subvert, resist the media’s incessant spectacularization of war.

Propositions for Non-Fascist Living

Lecture and Conversation

28 September 2023

To Watch Around, To Watch Outside

Thursday, 28 September 2023, 18.00 hrs Lecture and conversation with researcher and art historian Asia BazdyrievaRegister tickets here In this lecture, Bazdyrieva discusses the material implications of the sociotechnical imaginaries that contribute to the “resourcification” of Ukraine—wherein its land, natural resources, and people are viewed as an inexhaustible resource that is constitutively “outside” of European sustainability […]

Propositions for Non-Fascist Living

Book Fair

22-24 September 2023

This annotated bibliography has been put together by the Cell for Digital Discomfort (Cristina Cochior, Karl Moubarak, Jara Rocha). It gathers writings which both imagine and provide frameworks for new forms of sociotechnical implicancies and digital roughness, disobedience, friction and/or discomfort among them: a text by the oracle(s) group which calls for stochastic means of undoing the world’s systems of control; an essay from writer, journalist, and academic Syed Mustafa Ali which seeks a vocabulary to define decolonial computing; and, from sociologist and historian of technology Janet Vertesi, a call for a seamful response to glistening tech-cleanliness which makes clear the gritty overlaps of its infrastructures. Elsewhere in the bibliography, texts touch on concepts around radical computing that are as practical as they are speculative, looking into informatics, nonlocality, hostipitality, and the issues of cis-temic oppression and euro-white tech hegemony.

Bibliography

30/01/2023

Digital Discomfort

Execution

Critical Software Thing

Originating with the twelfth-century French term l’exécuteur du testament (the executor of the will), the term “execution” today finds itself entangled in myriad systems, such as linguistic systems, judiciary systems, computational systems, and systems of memory—all of which are touched upon in this text (originally published as an entry in The Posthuman Glossary [2028]) by Critical Software Thing (CST)). Be it by guillotine or CPU, as a realization of a decreed sentence, CST suggest that “execution” always relates to the now, “to an actualization, a presence which is always already over.” Highlighting the micro-instructions, micro-operations, and micro-temporality of systems executions, CST point toward the liveness inherent in them. Without succumbing to the seeming seamlessness of computation—harkening to the Cell for Digital Discomfort’s suggestion to embrace a seamful approach to technology—and with an awareness for the executive power of code, CST propose that code itself to be regarded as but “a partial instruction within a wider, dynamic ecology of many executing systems.”

Archive Essay Text

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Fellowship

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Publications

Year 2021

Toward the Not-Yet: Art as Public Practice

By Jeanne van Heeswijk, Maria Hlavajova, Rachael Rakes, +42

Year 2020

Deserting from the Culture Wars

By Maria Hlavajova, Sven Lütticken, Bini Adamczak, +11

Year 2019

Propositions for Non-Fascist Living: Tentative and Urgent

By Maria Hlavajova, Wietske Maas, Rosi Braidotti, +13

Year 2017

Marion von Osten: Once We Were Artists (A BAK Critical Reader in Artists’ Practice)

By Maria Hlavajova, Tom Holert, Hidde van Greuningen, +13

Year 2016

FORMER WEST: Art and the Contemporary After 1989

By Nancy Adajania, Edit András, Athena Athanasiou, +76

Year 2015

Future Publics (The Rest Can and Should Be Done by the People): A Critical Reader in Contemporary Art

By Nancy Adajania, Ariella Azoulay, Amelia Barikin, +14

Year 2010

The Return of Religion and Other Myths (handbook)

By Maria Hlavajova, Sven Lütticken, Marlies van Hak, +1

Year 2004

Now What? Artists Write!

By Mark Kremer, Maria Hlavajova, Annie Fletcher

Year 2003

Germaine Kruip, A Play To Stop to Add A Moment

By Maria Hlavajova, Germaine Kruip

Year 2002

Becoming Oneself

By Maria Hlavajova, Annie Fletcher, Nicolas Bourriaud, +7

Year 2001

Common Ground

By Maria Hlavajova, Krijn de Koning, André van Bergen, +5

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