Exhibition

22 May–24 July 2011

Call the Witness

groepstentoonstelling door Suzana Milevska

Call the Witness, exhibition view

The exhibition Call the Witness includes works by seven extraordinary artists who actively work from within and beyond their Roma identities. The works take up the role of “testimonies,” which in their own languages bear witness to past sufferings (such as the Holocaust) and of present and future anxieties, which seem to so intimately relate to the very existence of the Roma in our world. Each of these artists actively speculates about another possibility, and from within the Roma subjectivity proposes that we imagine how things could be otherwise.

This exhibition is part of a research trajectory leading to the realization of the Roma Pavilion in the context of the Collateral Events at the 54th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, 2011, organized by BAK. Commissioned by the Open Society Foundations and hosted by the UNESCO Venice Office located in the Palazzo Zorzi, the Roma Pavilion emerges into a makeshift exhibition over time through the flux of additional testimonies—works of art, performances, talks, and conversations by and with artists, philosophers, and politicians, in which the situation of the Roma and Roma art are considered as emblematic for the world today, in order to speculate, in soldarity, about more hopeful futures.

For more information regarding Call the Witness, see here.

Exhibitions

Exhibition
22.05.–24.07.2011
Call the Witness

Exhibition
01.06.–09.10.2011
Call the Witness, Roma Pavilion

Publications

newsletter
Call the Witness

essay
Call the Witness
by Suzana Milevska

exhibition text
Call the Witness
by Maria Hlavajova

Suggestions from the archive

Sint Maarten Parade

22 October–10 November 2023

BAK at the Sint Maarten Parade 2023

For Sint Maarten Parade 2023, Tools for Action—a non-profit organization that develops artistic interventions for political actions—collaborates with Utrecht-based members of Filipino, Caribbean, and other communities to collectively dream a parade compartment.

Panel Discussion

30 September 2023, 16.30-18.30

To the Other Side of the Concrete Wall

A book launch and panel discussion reflecting on the Jina Uprising, one year after its beginning.

Saturday, 30 September, 2023, 16:30–18:30 hrs at BAK, basis actuele kunst, Utrecht Organized by Jina Collective, a Netherlands-based feminist, leftist, anti-capitalist, anti-sexist, and pro-LQBTQIA+ action group that emerged from the Jina Uprising. This event launches a book of translated essays, co-published with BAK, which include some of the first English translations of texts by journalists […]

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.