Publications

BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht and MIT Press, Cambridge, MA and London are proud to announce the release of Toward the Not-Yet: Art as Public Practice, a reader in BAK’s SUPERBASICS series.

Toward the Not-Yet: Art as Public Practice combines handbook, dictionary, and anthology, and gathers artistic and cultural practices that are propositional, collective, and centered on the yearning for a just life-in-common. While future-oriented, these practices abandon a “universal” progressive route forward, instead enlivening a different chronopolitics: that of the not-yet. Powered by imagination-as-practice and the commitment to decolonial futurity, the contributors—among them artists, scholars, activists, poets, writers, and organizers—reflect on and propose forms of practicing equitable life in relation with one another, Earth, and time; models for safer spaces for humans and nonhumans; ways of radically shifting policies and planetary priorities; and tactics and methods of creating sanctuary. Catalyzed by the work of artist Jeanne van Heeswijk, which focuses on radicalizing situated civic processes, Toward the Not-Yet: Art as Public Practice imagines and enacts alternative ways of being together.   

Toward the Not-Yet: Art as Public Practice, edited by Jeanne van Heeswijk, Maria Hlavajova, and Rachael Rakes, includes contributions by: Yasmin Ahmed, Grace Lostia, Ying Que, and the basic activist kitchen; Barby Asante; Athena Athanasiou; Clara Balaguer and Gabriel Fontana; Chloë Bass; Aimee Carrillo Rowe; Carolina Caycedo; Merve Bedir; Black Quantum Futurism (Camae Ayewa and Rasheedah Phillips); Dhanveer Singh Brar and Louis Moreno; David Bravo, Miguel Robles-Durán, and Urban Front; Allan deSouza; Nicoline van Harskamp; Adelita Husni-Bey; Rosalba Icaza; Walidah Imarisha; Hamada al-Joumah and Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh; Nancy Jouwe; Elke Krasny; Sandra Lange; Joy Mariama Smith; Francesca Masoero and QANAT; Lorenza Mondada; Lisa Myers; Carmen Papalia; Elizabeth A. Povinelli; Laura Raicovich; Hafiz Rancajale; Jonas Staal; Ultra-red; Françoise Vergès; We are Here; and Carol Zou.

The publication is part of BAK’s series of BASICS readers, published in collaboration with MIT Press. Toward the Not-Yet: Art as Public Practice debuts a SUPERBASICS modality that embraces visual and artistic formats and multiple styles of engagement. The readers in this series probe some of the most urgent challenges of our time, engaging them through theoretically informed and politically driven artistic research and practice. If BAK is conceived as a basis—a base where art and theory meet social action to collectively negotiate the social, political, environmental, and technological conditions of the present, and, more importantly, develop and actualize proposals for being together otherwise—then BASICS is its publishing equivalent.

Edited by Jeanne van Heeswijk, Maria Hlavajova, and Rachael Rakes | Published by BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht and MIT Press, Cambridge, MA and London, 2021 | Design by Sean van den Steenhoven for Leftloft | English language | 336 pages | Paperback | ISBN: 978-0-262-54250-0

Toward the Not-Yet: Art as Public Practice has been made possible with financial contributions by the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture, and Science, the City of Utrecht, VSBfonds, and BankGiro Loterij Fonds.

Toward the Not-Yet: Art as Public Practice can be purchased at BAK or via MIT Press.