Lecture

23 September 2014

And So We Participate

On 23 September 2014, BAK’s artistic director Maria Hlavajova presents a lecture titled And So We Participate at the symposium The Museum as a Workshop, organized by the Centraal Museum, Utrecht (for more information on the symposium and the forthcoming publication of the same title, see here). The lecture is a part of a series of public and internal exchanges between the two key Utrecht-based art institutions, BAK and Centraal Museum, who, in the course of 2014–2016, explore various collaborative possibilities and contribute to rethinking the mission of the art institution in today’s rapidly changing global condition.

The collaboration comprises a parallel and mutually entwined series titled Future Vocabularies—Future Collections. While Future Vocabularies (2014–2016) is a discourse-driven research, learning, exhibition, and publication series aimed at rethinking our conceptual vernaculars in face of changing social, economic, and political contexts today, Future Collections examines various modes of embedding such present-day, future-oriented discourse into the key activity of the museum: that of art collecting.

Future Vocabularies—Future Collections departs from an acknowledgment of the present-day global condition, undergirded by the culture of networks (social, digital, religious, and other) and the proliferation of resistance forms and collective initiatives. Observing new politics and alliances in the streets and collective mobilizations across the world, the program asks how artistic, intellectual, and activist practices might help to build an understanding of the changes this new reality brings for the notions of “audience” and the “public.” Future Vocabularies—Future Collections reflects on the consequences these changes bear on the work of a middle-sized discursive art institution and the museum. Rather than taking the research of “future vocabularies” as a thematic exercise on issues of “survival,” “the posthuman,” or “degrowth,” the program mobilizes it as a method of acting in the world today. Accordingly, the two institutions seek ways of mutualizing their respective resources of space, time, competencies, knowledges, finances, and other in order to establish a model of sustainable cooperation with these newly evolving “future publics.”

The collaboration between BAK and Centraal Museum has been made possible by the DOEN Foundation, Amsterdam.

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Suggestions from the archive

Learning

10 May, 12.00–12 May, 18.00 2023

Complaint Making: Setting Up Conflict-Positive Spaces for Community Building Praxis

Vishnu would like to share feminist governance tools (FGT) focused on three of many tiers in community building praxis. FGT is based on the values of equity with an emphasis on creating psychologically safe environments, drawing on the use of consent. Decision-making processes, setting up conflict-positive spaces, and complaint-making as diversity work will form the body of this three-day training. Rooted in Vishnu’s autho-ethnographic practice, this work will explore the power dynamics that impact decision-making processes.

Performative

10 May, 12.00–12 May, 18.00 2023

The Diamond Mind II

In this dance training, the people will use a one-minute film of their own movement as material for a booklet—a sixteen page signature—that distributes their presence, their gesture, as an act of EQ. 

Learning

3 May, 12.00–4 May, 18.00 2023

Too Late To Say Sorry? 

A bad apology can ruin a friendship, destroy a community, or end a career. In this workshop, we will investigate the impact of apologies on our relationships and our worlds. Why and how do we make apologies? What can giving and receiving apologies teach us about values and integrity? Should you apologize for something you don’t really feel sorry for? We will explore conflict and how we like to be in conflict with others. We will dive into our own boundaries. We will seek to understand how honoring limits becomes an act of building (or freeing) better worlds capable of holding so many, many more of us.

Learning

28 April, 12.00–29 April, 18.00 2023

Huisje, Boompje, Beestje (D.A.F.O.N.T.)

In this rare masterclass, retired teacher and artist Glenda Martinus teaches participants a thing or two about painting with Microsoft Word. Martinus shares tips, tricks, and secrets on how to use this software to its unexpected potential as a drawing tool. Participants learn how to draw three basic objects—a house, a tree, and an animal—in a seemingly innocent exercise that perhaps contains more layered social commentary. Drawing the worlds we desire does not require expensive tools or education, simply a curiosity to understand how the monster’s tools can topple the house of the master.