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BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht
BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Pauwstraat, Utrecht, Netherlands

 

08 September 2015–24 June 2017

BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht  

Instituting Otherwise

  • Individuele lesprogramma’s op bandrecorder met hoofdtelefoons, open lesruimte, Granada Community School, Belvedere-Tiburon, Californië, foto: Rondal Partridge. Bron: Robert Propst, High School: The Process and the Place, red. Ruth Weinstock (New York: Educational Facilities Laboratories, 1972)

  • Marion von Osten: Once We Were Artists (A BAK Critical Reader in Artists’ Practice), published by BAK, Utrecht and Valiz, Amsterdam. Edited by Maria Hlavajova and Tom Holert

  • Englishes, a solo exhibition by Nicoline van Harskamp

  • Stefanos Tsivopoulos, Geometry of Fear, 2012. Film still, courtesy of Stefanos Tsivopoulos and Kalfayan Galleries Athene & Thessaloniki

In 2016–2017, BAK dedicates a series of discursive, educational, and exhibitionary projects to the notion of the institution and how to, amidst contemporary challenges, “institute otherwise.” Within the long-term trajectory Future Vocabularies (2014–2017), the series Instituting Otherwise probes ways of imagining—as well as embodying and inhabiting—alternative institutional practices in myriad arenas: from the state, law, and democracy to infrastructures of education, health, care, intimacy, and art, to discursive formations and imaginary spaces.

Aware that institutions simultaneously support and oppress, the project engages the seeming paradox of a practice that both questions and defends (public) institutions. What are ways of instituting that are informed by, and shaped through, the practice of institutional critique? How can these help set infrastructures that engage institutions but escape “institutionalization”? How to (re)think and (re)claim public spaces, public homes, public schools, public hospitals, public libraries, and public art institutions as interlocutors between care and power?

 

 

 

Exhibitions

30.01.–01.05.2016
Unstated (or, Living Without Approval)

24.09.–20.11.2016
Englishes

02.12.2016–05.02.2017
Learning Laboratories

11.03.–21.05.2017
To Seminar

Public program

Learning place
08.09.2015–28.04.2016
Learning Place: Refugee Crisis, or How to Change Things with Art

Congress
29.–31.01.2016
New World Summit: Stateless Democracy

Symposium
24.06.2017 10.30 hrs
Once We Were Artists

 

In collaboration with

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.

Exhibition

Performative Lecture

26 October 2023

Contemporary History of Ukraine, 11th Rehearsal

Thursday, 26 October 2023, 18.00 hrsPerformative lecture by documentary filmmaker and artist Oksana Kazmina Register tickets here This lecture is the eleventh rehearsal of a virtual walk through transpersonal landscapes of memories across various Ukrainian localities. Based on footage and chats with (intimate) friends, Kazmina navigates between different digital environments—including personal videos, recorded conversations, and Google […]