The BAK 2020 Fellowship program is a three-month program, taking place in autumn 2020, organized in two parallel strands. Within the first strand, nine Fellowships are awarded to practitioners engaged with local communities and struggles for developing a focus on long lasting, mutual support with and through BAK as a public art institution. Former BAK Fellow and artist Jeanne van Heeswijk joins this strand as BAK Associate to conceptually guide the research and work on forms of proximity and building connections. Within the second strand, six Fellowships are awarded to researchers within the network freethought for developing their research on “spectral infrastructures.”
Since 2017, BAK conducts a post-academic Fellowship Program with, at its center, research on reframing and rethinking conditions of the contemporary through politically driven art-making and inquiry. The Fellowship Program offers research positions to Netherlands- and internationally-based practitioners at the intersection of art, theory, and social action. With each iteration of the Fellowship, BAK Associates help guide the foci of the collaborative research and study practices. BAK Fellows’ research speak to collective processes, artistic research, infrastructural transformation, and have specific affinity to BAK’s current trajectory Propositions for Non-Fascist Living (2017–ongoing), which engages aesthetico-political experimentation with and around the urgencies of the present. The Fellowship Program develops talent and critical practice, and fosters artistic and theoretical inquiry in concert with the public projects of BAK, advancing the notion of art as a public sphere and a political space.
Exploring the possibilities of art as a public good and a site of public pedagogies, the 2020 Fellowship experiments with and develops formats, practices, collaborative processes, social imagination, theory, and anticipatory learning methods so as to shape the program in the forthcoming funding period 2021–2024 with BAK. A driving force of this edition is to strengthen the invited Fellows’ research, practice, ability to sustainably work for causes and struggles they are politically and personally aligned with, as well as to nourish connection and collaboration, and further build their long term involvement with BAK.
BAK Fellowships are low-residential. BAK Fellows regularly gather at BAK and other physical and virtual spaces for Fellows Intensives with visiting artists, scholars, and other cultural practitioners, as well as public programming, visits, and collaborations with various organizations in the Netherlands and beyond. Thanks to collaborations with HKU University of the Arts, in particular, the Fellows broaden their research practices through exchanges with students and other cultural practitioners in their respective fields.
For any questions regarding the BAK Fellowship, contact Irene Calabuch Mirón at fellowship@bakonline.org
The first strand of the BAK 2020 Fellows meet in a hybrid on/offline second Intensive. The Fellows work on timelines that explore political and personal histories, ways of working together, imaginings and practices for shared leadership, collaboration, and developing strategies and tactics for building lasting, genuine relations with BAK as a public institution and a […]
BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht and MIT Press, Cambridge, MA and London present Propositions for Non-Fascist Living: Tentative and Urgent, the first reader in BAK’s BASICS series. Print this page BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht and MIT Press, Cambridge, MA and London present Propositions for Non-Fascist Living: Tentative and Urgent, edited by Maria […]
Have you checked out BAK’s online publishing platform Prospections? Along with many other practitioners at the intersection of art, theory, and social action, several Fellows have been and continue to contribute to the platform. Prospections centers propositional and anticipatory intervention, documentation, research, and discourse; for instance with general themes of Tactical Solidarity and How to […]
BAK 2020 Fellow Shay Raviv represents De Voorkamer at DoorVanVoor Excursion # 3: On the road in Utrecht!, Stedelijk Museum Schiedam, 25 September 2020. De Voorkamer is an inclusive meeting space in which the talents of status holders, people living in asylum seekers’ centers, and other local communities are encouraged, and a space that BAK […]
Several generations of Fellows are involved in this year’s MaHKU, Utrecht, graduation show If Not Now, taking place at BAK from 30 September–11 October 2020. One BAK 2020 Fellowship position has been awarded to the Mutual Support Platform (MSP), a space for conversations and actions by/between/for students, alumni, and teachers of the MAFA HKU, Utrecht. […]
In September the Netherlands-based stream of the BAK 2020 Fellows gather at BAK, with social distance, to begin their work together. Through mapping exercises, establishing collective protocols (or something close to it), spending time with the BAK team, and sharing well-ventilated space, a sense of what is to come in the Fellowship has emerged. This […]
BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht is proud to announce the Post-Academic BAK 2020 Fellows. Exploring the possibilities of art as a public good and a site of public pedagogies, the 2020 Fellowship experiments with and develops formats, practices, collaborative processes, social imagination, theory, and anticipatory learning methods so as to shape the program in the forthcoming funding period 2021–2024 with BAK.
