BAK Summer School: Art and Practice in the Otherwise

The BAK Summer School: Art and Practice in the Otherwise is a collaborative and intensive learning week at BAK, basis voor actuele kunst from 16–20 July 2018 in Utrecht, Netherlands.

Application deadline: 1 June, 2018

The BAK Summer School: Art and Practice in the Otherwise is an advanced, interdisciplinary course that brings together those involved in arts, academia, and activisms to collectively think through, learn about, and imagine critical, politically-informed artistic practices that grasp and influence our dramatically changing times.

Social, environmental, geopolitical, economic, and technological structures are rapidly rearranging. Ideas, practices, and meanings of resistance, coming together, identity, activist and artistic practice, and collectivity and closeness—as well as the notions of artistic production, the (art) institution, and the public—are transforming. This course begins from the understanding that art has the radical potential to enable the otherwise, meaning practices, spaces, imaginaries, centerings, and politico-aesthetic experiments at odds with the socio-political orders of worth and power that globalized imperialisms and rising fascisms have so violently gotten recognized as the status quo.

Through case studies, storytelling, theory, presentations, discussions, workshops, study groups, and exercises, the BAK Summer School: Art and Practice in the Otherwise asks about and speaks to art as a space in which radical (re)workings can flourish. Concepts of alternative and collective practice, contemporary constructions of “we,” institutional structuring, potentials of performative collectivity, looming and present fascisms, etc. are discussed so as to imagine what shapes art as otherwise may take, what is needed for such endeavors, and how to think about the contemporary with and through art in order to build these visions and practices.

The BAK Summer School: Art and Practice in the Otherwise turns to art practice, theory, and institutions that work at these ontological and material arrangements. We also draw upon BAK research, including our current four-year trajectory Propositions for Non-Fascist Living (2017–2020); our connected Fellowship Program, which hosts 10 exemplary interdisciplinary fellows each year; FORMER WEST (2008–2016), which developed a critical understanding of the legacies of 1989’s radical resistance to power in order to reevaluate the global present and speculate about global futures; and Future Vocabularies (2013–2016), which attempted to act out concrete propositions that explore shifts in the existing conceptual vocabularies within artistic, intellectual, and activist practices.

The BAK Summer School: Art and Practice in the Otherwise takes place from 16 through 20 July 2018 at BAK in Utrecht, Netherlands. Applications can be submitted via the Utrecht Summer School website by 1 June 2018. The fee for the course and materials, to be paid upon acceptance, is 450 EUR. Accommodation by the Utrecht Summer School is an additional 200 EUR, for which you can sign up during your application process. Fees exclude meals and travel. Limited fee reductions may be possible; please inquire about this possibility before 10 April 2018. Please direct any questions to Whitney Stark at whitney@bakonline.org.

This BAK Summer School: Art and Practice in the Otherwise is organized by Maria Hlavajova, Artistic Director and Whitney Stark, Curator of Discourse and Publications at BAK. Contributors include 2017/2018 BAK Fellow, researcher, and writer Isshaq Al-Barbary; 2017/2018 BAK Fellow and artist Matthijs de Bruijne and artist and researcher Cecilia Vallejos; curator and educator Clare Butcher; curator and writer Chandra Frank; artist and 2017/2018 BAK Fellow Ola Hassanain; cultural historian and worker Nancy Jouwe; curator Matteo Lucchetti; and others.

This is a discourse-driven course organized by BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht in collaboration with HKU University of the Arts Utrecht and Utrecht Summer School.