Exhibition

31 August–09 October 2013

FORMER WEST: Notes from Berlin

Notes from Berlin, exhibition view

With this makeshift, impromptu composition of artworks and discourse, we share with our Utrecht publics a series of spontaneously assembled impressions—notes as it were—from a major manifestation of BAK’s flagship project FORMER WEST: Documents, Constellations, Prospects, realized earlier in 2013 in collaboration with Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. Neither an exhibition nor a conference, it entails no order, but rhythms and accidents; no certainty, but a set of propositions; no script, but an invitation to imagine a “what if” scenario—and, with it, the world otherwise…

FORMER WEST (2008–2016) is a long-term research, education, exhibition, and publication project aimed at a critical reinterpretation of post-1989, post-Cold War histories around an imaginary of “formerness,” countering the persistent hegemonies of the so-called West within a global context. In an attempt to alter the narrative of our own time, and reclaim from there the future as a field of possibility, FORMER WEST enables a continuous flow of manifold conversations among artists, theorists, students, activists, and other varied publics.

Suggestions from the archive

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.