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Fellowship

BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht is proud to announce the 2023/2024 Fellows within the BAK Fellowship for Situated Practice post-academic program, taking place in a federated constellation of two research cells in Istanbul and Utrecht.

Hosted by The Istanbul Biennial Production and Research Programme (ÇAP) at Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (İKSV), the Istanbul cell is composed of artist collective adaptör projekt; artist Betül Aksu; journalist and documentary filmmaker Varduhi Balyan; artist, writer, and translator Alev Ersan; artist, researcher, and architect Hanieh Fatouraee; filmmaking duo Enis Köstepen and Irmak Karasu; artist and academic Esra Oskay; artist collective SB Arch Lab; artist and researcher Seher Uysal; and activist and researcher Ayça Yüksel.

The BAK cell in Utrecht is composed of artist Teresa Borasino; artist Iliada Charalambous; artist and activist Yuliia Elyas; filmmaker, researcher, and educator  Astrid Feringa; collective The Garage School; curator, dramaturge, and researcher Marta Keil; conceptual visual artist and researcher Andrea Knezovic; designer and artist Siwar Krai(y)tem; choreographer, sound artist, and researcher Paula Montecinos Oliva; artist and activist Maoyi Qiu; collective Radical Data; and documentary maker and editor Firat Yücel.

The Fellows have been selected on the basis of their proposals to develop experimental research within the expanded field of contemporary art and in connection with the overarching research trajectory “Alignment/Nonalignment”—a layered and urgent geopolitical proposition pertaining to the questions of organization, positionality, and solidarity. This research focus emerged in the context of the 2021/2022 edition of the BAK Fellowship for Situated Practice and was specifically prompted by the unjustifiable military invasion of Ukraine: a chain of events that strengthened the refusal of all forms of imperialism and amplified the need for practices of sharing and reconnection with collectivist initiatives, non-official histories, and subterranean legacies that have enacted and cultivated solidarities against the grain of imposed archives, identities, and structures.

BAK has been developing its post-academic fellowship program since 2017. The program focuses on facilitating research that reframes and rethinks conditions of the contemporary through theoretically informed and sociopolitically driven art and inquiry. It offers positions to practitioners working across art, theory, and social action, providing the opportunity and resources to develop their respective practice, research, and talent.

The 2023/2024 BAK Fellowship for Situated Practice is realized by BAK in collaboration with The Istanbul Biennial Production and Research Programme, Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (İKSV), Istanbul.

The BAK Fellowship for Situated Practice is convened by Zeyno Pekünlü and Dina Mohamed,  and coordinated by Irene Calabuch Mirón.

BAK’s main partner in the field of education and research is HKU University of the Arts, Utrecht.

BAK’s activities have been made possible through financial contributions by the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science and the City of Utrecht.

BAK 2023/2024 Fellows

Fellow 2023/2024

Maoyi Qiu

Maoyi Qiu is an artist, activist, and is a founding member of Q-Space—a queer feminist collective established in Beijing in 2016—as well as a member of Soupspoon Collective in Rotterdam since 2022. Qiu’s practice focuses on critical spatial practices, transfeminist somatic practices, dataveillance, and the impact of technology on the human body and emotions. Utilizing […]

Fellow 2023/2024

Esra Oskay

Esra Oskay is an artist and academic. Her ongoing work examines the asymmetries of visibility, claims of accessibility, and transparency as a promise of equity, and explores alternative means of documentation that probe the limits of what can be seen and said.   During the BAK Fellowship for Situated Practice Oskay will focus on the implicit […]

Fellow 2023/2024

Yuliia Elyas

Yuliia Elyas is an artist and activist, currently based in Utrecht. She holds a master’s degree in fine arts from HKU University of the Arts Utrecht, Utrecht. She is the founder of the Help Ukraine Utrecht initiative—a project aimed at providing humanitarian aid and support to Ukrainians affected by the War—started at HKU Loods, Utrecht […]

Fellow 2023/2024

Seher Uysal

Seher Uysal (b.1983) is a visual artist and researcher based in Istanbul. Inquiries into the everyday often shape her artistic practice and her works are primarily artistic research based reflections on spatial, historical or cultural conditions. She is interested in the exploration of manifold perspectives and understandings of phenomenon, social memory, fact and fiction and […]

Fellow 2023/2024

Marta Keil

Marta Keil is performing arts curator, dramaturge, and researcher. She collaborates as a freelance curator, mentor, advisor, and dramaturge with various artistic and educational institutions, most recently with Residenz Schauspiel, Leipzig; München Kammerspiele, Munich; Viernulvier, Ghent; New Theatre Institute of Latvia, Riga; Rosendal Teater, Trondheim; and DAS Theatre, Utrecht University, Utrecht. She is a member […]

Fellow 2023/2024

Betül Aksu

Betül Aksu is an artist whose work explores the ways disciplinary, territorial and systemic boundaries manifest in everyday life through installation, performance, text and printmaking. As part of the BAK Fellowship for Situated Practice, she will explore the notion of freedom of movement and the ways in which movement is restricted in the art worlds. […]

Fellow 2023/2024 2023/2024

Andrea Knezović

Andrea Knezović is a conceptual visual artist and researcher with an master’s of research in artistic research from the University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam and a bachelor’s degree from Academy of Visual Arts, Ljubljana. Knezović’s research interests center around the politics of care, care’s institutional implications, and its mythological aspect.   During the BAK Fellowship for Situated […]

Fellow 2023/2024

Iliada Charalambous

Iliada Charalambous is an artist, and graduate of the Dutch Art Institute, Roaming Academy, Arnhem. Charalambous works with the idea of citizen assemblies as a form of counter-action to the fractured environment shaped by state politics. She works in a variety of collaborative constellations to create spaces for individuals or groups to gather and share […]

Fellow 2023/2024

SB Arch Lab collective

Gülistan Kenanoğlu is an architectural researcher and independent curator. She works under SBArchLab, of which she is the co-founder, and specializes in exhibition practices around postcolonial art and architecture history and the effects of conflicts on cities that benefit from transnational studies.  Artistic and architectural projects she has taken part in include: Becoming Tree, Atlas […]

Fellow 2023/2024

Alev Ersan

Alev Ersan is an artist, writer, and translator. Her practice ranges from installations incorporating audio, visual, and textual content and site-responsive performances to stop-motion animation and poetry. Ersan works with narrative and translation as tools, as materials, and as modes of thinking through the porous relations between language, memory, and desire within private and public […]

Fellow 2023/2024

Ayça Yüksel

Ayça Yüksel is a PhD candidate at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, Beyoğlu, and an activist researcher of sociology. Her ongoing research explores various aspects including space; the right to the city, commoning, and solidarity practices; alternative resistance; and the relationship between ecology, multi-species, and care labor. Currently, she examines the tea plant and human […]

Fellow 2023/2024

Siwar Krai(y)tem

Siwar Krai(y)tem is a multilingual designer, researcher, writer, and artist based between Beirut and Amsterdam. Her research and artistic practice focuses on multilingualism and language in times of transformation, as well as the construction of society through language. Since May 2021, she has co-curated the platform Latlateh (which translates from Arabic to mean “unmeaningful chatter”), […]

Fellow 2023/2024

Paula Montecinos Oliva

Paula Montecinos Oliva is a choreographer, sound artist, and researcher whose practice is grounded on the affordances of dance and live-sound performance. With an embodied, decolonial, and technofeminist approach, her practice embraces the physical and spatial dynamics of sonic experience, and questions the materiality of sound, listening, and movement through DIY analog synthesis, experimental vocals, […]

Fellow 2023/2024

Astrid Feringa

Astrid Feringa is a researcher, filmmaker, and educator. She is co-founder and artistic director of Bureau Rizoom, Leeuwarden and lecturer at AKI/ArtEZ University of the Arts, Enschede. Her practice is interested in mechanisms of documentation and distribution, and their entanglement with sociopolitical power dynamics. Working with archival and found materials, and through a framework of […]

Fellow 2023/2024

Radical Data

Rayén Jara Mitrovich 🦄 and Jo Jara Kroese 🌸 are the co-founders of Radical Data 🦾, a collective repurposing digital technology 💻 for liberation and joy ✨. Bringing together mathematicians 🧮, technologists 📱, dancers 🕺🏼, and designers ✍🏼, they have built tools 🧰 for anti-fascism, been political consultants for socialists in Latin America, and made […]

Fellow 2023/2024

Fırat Yücel

Fırat Yücel is a documentary maker and an editor who also curates the video series Altyazı Fasikül: Free Cinema, a subbranch of Altyazı Cinema Association devoted to supporting political film and video makers at risk in Turkey and elsewhere. His editorial and curatorial practice focuses on collective filmmaking and resistance against censorship, while his documentaries […]

Fellow 2023/2024

Teresa Borasino

Teresa Borasino is an artist whose work balances upon the fertile edges between art and activism—the space between poetics, politics, and radical engagement with social movements. Her practice spans a variety of mediums, encompassing public interventions, performances, installations, soundscapes, and textual expressions. She seeks to contribute to the pluriversing of the world by cultivating a […]

Fellow 2023/2024

Hanieh Fatouraee

Hanieh Fatouraee an a-disciplinary researcher, artist, and architect. She explores spatial knowledge systems in the Middle East. She has an interest in deconstructing dominating narratives through the use of spatial/visual methodologies, poetic exploration, and superstitious investigation. Part of her Fellowship for Situated Practice she is currently researching the complexities of vasvas through its thresholds of […]

Fellow 2023/2024

Adaptor project: Collective (Gülşah Özgen and Sıla Bozdeveci)  

Gülşah Özgen, a filmmaker and researcher, actively participates in political film projects and instructs a course that explores the disruption of traditional duality (interior/exterior, time/space) in architecture. She researches about “companions” outside of power and control, as influenced by feminist storytelling, speculative fiction, and experimental cinema. Through her research, Ozgen delves into the intricacies of […]

Fellow 2023/2024

Enis Köstepen and Irmak Karasu

Enis Köstepen and Irmak Karasu are filmmakers interested in how political thinking implicates forms of cultural practices. Köstepen and Karasu have been conversing on the powers of personal and public mourning for a long while.   Enis Köstepen’s practice includes film criticism, production, research, and activism in anti-war, urban rights, and freedom of expression. In his […]

Fellow 2023/2024

Vaduhi Balyan

Varduhi Balyan is a documentary filmmaker and journalist. She was born in Armenia to a family that had recently migrated from Shamkir, Soviet Azerbaijan. After graduating from the Turkish Studies Department of Yerevan State University, she moved to Istanbul, where she is currently based. She earned her MA at Istanbul Bilgi University with an MA […]

Fellow 2023/2024

The Garage School

The Garage School is an informal study program that has no consistent or permanent infrastructure. It exists on very little; our schools emerge like fruiting bodies in relation to a particular place, subject, or host(s). We are interested in knowledge and tools that are considered irrelevant, of low quality, or without official validity.  This iteration […]