Lecture, Conversation

20 April 2017, 19.00

Reflection on Knowability

Irit Rogoff at the 3rd Former West research congress in Vienna, 2012

As part of the exhibition To Seminar, BAK organizes a series of performances, talks, and public meetings inquiring how learning about, with, and through art can become a collective practice of thinking and acting out imaginaries alternative to those of the crises-ridden contemporary.

On Thursday 20 April 2017 BAK organizes Reflection on Knowability, a lecture by Irit Rogoff, followed by a conversation moderated by Kitty Zijlmans. Knowledge is always framed and sanctioned. There are regimes of knowledge, such as disciplines, and there are conditions of knowledge, such as geopolitics. As greater permissions enter the field of knowledge in the wake of emergent, complex practices, so do reflections on “knowability”—whether it can survive collapsing frameworks, whether it is actually the desired effect of research, and whether a shaken belief in “knowability” stands in the way of consciousness.

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.