Marking the beginning of a new phase, BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht embarks upon a six-month period of thinking and planning.

Artist Jeanne van Heeswijk, a long-time collaborator of BAK, who has recently joined the organization as artistic director, convenes a series of meetings and conversations between January and June 2025 to consider directions for the organization amidst overlapping political, social, economic, and climate crises. These conversations are organized to address the kinds of infrastructure most necessary and useful for sustaining artistic and cultural practices that are driven by current urgencies. The terrifying undoing of the promise of democracy in the rise of anti-democratic, authoritarian, right-wing politics in the Netherlands and worldwide necessitates cultural formations that cultivate thinking, imagining, and acting; these approaches must prioritize equity and repair to counteract and reinvent the status quo. Recognizing the need for cultural space to function as a location of intimacy, critique, exploration, and possibility, the convenings focus on tactical imagination and collective practices that provide both respite and a place from which to act.

The work ahead to confront democracy’s failures can be modeled hyper-locally, within cultural infrastructures. Among these, BAK’s history of political and social practice provides a ready base for what must come next. Basecamp for Tactical Imaginaries proposes a reenvisioning of this cultural infrastructure so as to confront the orchestrated ruination of critical organizations by those in power, including numerous progressive artistic and learning institutions, of which BAK’s defunding from Dutch public budgets is but one, very modest, example. It is urgent to come together and remake these public institutions for the common good.

To these ends, Basecamp for Tactical Imaginaries invites trusted communities consisting of cultural and knowledge workers, students, grassroots organizations, activists, and other social actors from BAK’s former and current collaborations and beyond—to debate and model an art institution capable of meeting the political challenges of today and tomorrow.

Working from van Heeswijk’s long-time collective practice of learning by radically imagining and embodying a more just future, the series is co-convened with college student and bak Young Fellow 2023/2024 Raidan Abdul Baqi Shamsan; architect and researcher Merve Bedir; community organizer and housing activist Mustapha Eaisaouiyen; artist, filmmaker, and activist Ehsan Fardjadniya; musician and producer Triwish Hanoeman; performance designer and researcher Sandra Lange; activist, vegan chef, fermentation enthusiast, and music programmer Grace Lostia; art historian, artist, and co-learner Sophie Mak-Schram; installation and movement artist, activist, educator, and architectural designer Joy Mariama Smith; artist and researcher Dina Mohamed; artist and community organizer Molemo Moiloa; cultural worker and community organizer Alejandro Navarrete Cortés; writer and curator Laura Raicovich; artist and propaganda researcher Jonas Staal; and artist, educator, and researcher Mick Wilson, among others.

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With shock and disbelief we have received the news that Raad voor Cultuur (Council for Culture) has advised the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science to stop funding BAK, basis voor actuele kunst for the period 2025–2028. This comes on top of Utrecht municipality's decision to withdraw their subsidy. At this incredibly sad moment, we draw strength from how, over the past 25 years, BAK has become the global art institution—by and with others—for groundbreaking artistic practice, theory, and social engagement. Thousands of messages of support we have received in recent weeks tell this story.

Especially now, in times of worrying political developments in our society, advisory committees of the progressive Utrecht City Council and Raad voor Cultuur should support important democratic cultural institutions like BAK. This decision means that countless people and communities in Utrecht, the Netherlands, and internationally—artists, pupils and students, as well as a rich diversity of cultural actors, vulnerable groups, and general audiences—lose a basis for imagining and shaping the world differently. We will do all we can to continue protecting such a base.

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On 26 June 2024, we received word that the council of mayor and aldermen of Utrecht adopted the advice of the Advisory Committee Culture Note 2025-2028 in its entirety. This decision will end the multi-year subsidy to BAK. This decision represents a serious threat to BAK's existence as a base for artists, critical cultural players, and the many communities in Utrecht and beyond that are part of it. Consequently, the city of Utrecht will lose a crucial platform for collective imagination, experimentation, and education, which works towards a just future for all. Read BAK's statement below and follow, read, listen, watch, and write along to the rapidly growing solidarity archive consisting of thousands of testimonies, statements of support, and stories.
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With shock and disbelief we received the report Kleur bekennen (Taking a stance) from the Utrecht Advisory Committee on the Culture Memorandum 2025–2028. The report proposes that BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht, should not be financed in the coming years. This is a devastating blow for BAK, a base that for 24 years has been committed to providing the city of Utrecht with a unique space where art, knowledge, and social action come together in ever-innovative ways. This news also deeply affects even more so all of the artists and other cultural players with whom BAK works, as well as a rich diversity of communities in Utrecht and beyond with whom we exchange and collaborate intensively: from vulnerable communities to the general public; from the community kitchen network to local and international postgraduate fellows; from the students of art academies and universities (including HKU University of the Arts and Utrecht University) to high school students; and from grassroots organizations to established cultural institutions.

BAK is a socially driven cultural institution, but also the only post-academic institution in Utrecht. Amsterdam has Rijksakademie and De Ateliers, Maastricht has Jan van Eyck Academie – and Utrecht has BAK. In the Netherlands, BAK uniquely combines the functions of presentation and post-academy. This offers a distinct opportunity for talent development, as well as the bringing together of the local and the (inter)national in the city of Utrecht. BAK is a place where art’s ability to dream collectively is nourished in order to shape a better world together. We do this through public programming in the form of meetings about urgent issues affecting the city and beyond, and exhibitions, seminars, and performances. We do this through research into social and ecological themes, through the production of new works of art, through the development of new talent, and through education.

The advice recognizes the high artistic quality of BAK’s practice and describes this as “consistent and artistically strong.” The results continue to “seep through into the broader cultural field, both in Utrecht, nationally and internationally.” The advice also values ​​“an intensive relationship with makers and visitors,” as well as “the way in which BAK connects an interesting international network with a solid local network.” In summary, the committee appreciates BAK’s function as a crucial hub, appreciates its thematic depth, the way in which complex content is made accessible to a broader audience, and all of our efforts to integrate social themes into both the program and business operations. It is therefore incomprehensible that the same advice, mere sentences after praising the local network and connections in the city, concludes that there is insufficient exchange with other players in the cultural field, and that the contribution to this ecosystem is considered limited.

The conclusion to not finance BAK is therefore worrying and alarming, not only for us but especially for the city. Particularly when you consider that Utrecht is and wants to be a progressive haven, with policymakers who to this day welcome, support, and protect innovative forms of participatory, social art practices. This is of great importance in times of growing populism and world conflicts, and it is crucial to counter the political misconception that culture is only entertainment or “daytime recreation.” It is incomprehensible how, with a stroke of the pen, the city of Utrecht wants to demolish part of its own progressive cultural infrastructure that it has helped to build over the past decades.

In this context, we also find it shocking to read how Utrecht particularly marginalizes and underfunds the field of visual arts compared to other art disciplinesAccording to this advice, of the total budget available for culture in Utrecht in 2025–2028 , only 1,61% (!) is dedicated to the contemporary (visual) art institutions. In 2021–2024 it was 6,7% of the total budget.. At BAK we argue for the recognition of visual art and its infrastructure as a crucial component for Utrecht that aspires to be a “healthy city of and for everyone.” We are therefore concerned that other institutions, such as IMPAKT (Centre for Media Culture), are also not supported.

These past days, we have received an extraordinary amount of support from our partner organizations, artists, colleagues, friends, self-organized collectives, and the general public about the importance of BAK for the city and its cultural ecosystem – locally, nationally, and internationally. While we draw strength from this support, we will convince Utrecht that we need art institutions like BAK. We need each other, more than ever.

Team BAK
Utrecht, 6 June 2024