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Fellowship

Fellow 2019/2020

Grant Watson

Grant Watson

Curator, artist, and writer Grant Watson’s interview project How We Behave (2012–ongoing) explores queer ascesis as a personal and a collective politics. His work has been shown at Extra City, Antwerp, 2017; Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2017; State of Concept, Athens, 2016; Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, 2015; The Showroom, London, 2015; and If I Can’t Dance, Amsterdam, 2014. He has curated projects with Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 2019; Lunds Konsthal, Dublin, 2014; nGbK, Berlin, 2014; Tate Liverpool, Liverpool, 2014; Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, 2013; among others. He was Co-Artistic Director of bauhaus imaginista (2016–2019) along with Marion von Osten, has held numerous curatorial positions, and has been Tutor at the Royal College of Art, London, since 2015. He has a PhD in Visual Cultures from Goldsmiths University of London, London. Watson lives and works in London.

Grant Watson

Curator, artist, and writer Grant Watson’s interview project How We Behave (2012–ongoing) explores queer ascesis as a personal and a collective politics. His work has been shown at Extra City, Antwerp, 2017; Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2017; State of Concept, Athens, 2016; Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, 2015; The Showroom, London, 2015; and If I Can’t Dance, Amsterdam, 2014. He has curated projects with Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 2019; Lunds Konsthal, Dublin, 2014; nGbK, Berlin, 2014; Tate Liverpool, Liverpool, 2014; Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, 2013; among others. He was Co-Artistic Director of bauhaus imaginista (2016–2019) along with Marion von Osten, has held numerous curatorial positions, and has been Tutor at the Royal College of Art, London, since 2015. He has a PhD in Visual Cultures from Goldsmiths University of London, London. Watson lives and works in London.

Fellowship Research Trajectory

Grant Watson’s research for BAK is conducted through the interview project How We Behave, an archive of radical practice—understood as life practice, aesthetic practice, and political practice—which has been developed since 2012. How We Behave pursues the idea of self-care, predominantly focusing on queer and feminist positions, and the interaction between personal stories and collective political projects, in the context of neoliberal hegemony and ecological crisis. At BAK, this research has been developed through interviews with the 2020 BAK Fellows and as a response to BAK’s long term research itinerary Propositions for Non-Fascist Living (2017-ongoing). Interviewees articulate resistance to multiform oppressions (including) in relation to race, gender, sexuality, military occupation, and cultures of competition and alienated labour; and they describe how political practices get to be formulated. Using an unstructured format, the interviews allow narratives to emerge, which are then edited in collaboration with interviewees, producing stories constructed from the interview transcripts that are then read by performers. A concurrent line of reading and research explores intersections between queer and left politics, through historical examples, such as the Marxist orientation of groups like the Gay Left Collective in the 1970s, as well as contemporary writing, which integrates questions of sexuality and gender, insights from ecology, and counterculture with a broader structural analysis from the Left.

 

Online Screening of Oleksiy Radynski’s Landslide and Interview with Grant Watson

BAK 2019/2020 Fellow Oleksiy Radynski’s film Landslide (2016) premieres online 26 August 2020 as part of the screening series From Matter to Data: Ecology of Infrastructures, 29 July–9 September 2020, Museum of Modern Art, New York. This series presents a selection of 15 films and video works available in three part. Radynski’s film is part of […]

Andre Reeder and Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Fellows Intensive

Fellows Mitchell Esajas, Grant Watson, and Reem Shilleh, along with BAK, were preparing to co-convene a Fellows Intensive beginning 23 March, 2020. With lockdowns starting in Europe just a week before, the plans became impossible in their imagined forms and the Fellows were unable to gather at BAK, visit The Black Archives in Amsterdam, do […]

Program

sonic science fiction transmission

12 September 2020, 12.00-21.45

Propositions #12: Waves Breaking Walls, Futures in Movement

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