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Fellowship

Fellow 2017/2018

Quinsy Gario

Quinsy Gario is a visual and performance artist from the Dutch Caribbean. His most well-known work, Zwarte Piet Is Racisme (2011–2012), critiqued the general knowledge surrounding the racist Dutch figure and practice of Zwarte Piet (Black Pete), later bringing into the open the governmental institutional support that keeps the figure alive in the Netherlands. He has an academic background in gender studies and postcolonial studies and is a graduate of the Master Artistic Research program at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague. In 2017 he received a Humanity in Action Detroit Fellowship. Gario is a board member of De Appel, Keti Koti Table, and The One Minutes, a member of the pan-African artist collective State of L3, and is a recurring participant of the Black Europe Body Politics biannual conference series.

Quinsy Gario

Quinsy Gario is a visual and performance artist from the Dutch Caribbean. His most well-known work, Zwarte Piet Is Racisme (2011–2012), critiqued the general knowledge surrounding the racist Dutch figure and practice of Zwarte Piet (Black Pete), later bringing into the open the governmental institutional support that keeps the figure alive in the Netherlands. He has an academic background in gender studies and postcolonial studies and is a graduate of the Master Artistic Research program at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague. In 2017 he received a Humanity in Action Detroit Fellowship. Gario is a board member of De Appel, Keti Koti Table, and The One Minutes, a member of the pan-African artist collective State of L3, and is a recurring participant of the Black Europe Body Politics biannual conference series.

Fellowship Research Trajectory

Quinsy Gario’s research focus is on the residue of performances and how projection media, in particular overhead projectors and slide projectors, co-constructed the politics of self and other during the decolonization period after World War II. By looking at the continuous invocation of the ephemeral and immaterial presence of performances through their material consequences, and what has been left behind, Gario further develops his performance practice as containing the absence of his body. He examines the political workings behind the aforementioned projection media. With photography having been developed in tandem with colonial expansion and used for anthropologically guided domination, Gario is interested in the creation of projections of self-worth and self-examination by those who were ridding themselves of colonial domination and subjugation.

A Conversation on: The Power of Doing Nothing

BAK 2019/2020 Fellow Joy Mariama Smith and BAK 2017/2018 BAK Fellow Quinsy Gario join Framer Framed for A Conversation on: The Power of Doing Nothing (2020), a radio program discussing productivity, refusal, and the racialized inequalities of rest. 

Roet in het Eten Book Launch

As part of Propositions #2: Assemblism, Quinsy Gario presents his new book Roet in het Eten [Spanner in the Works],an anthology of newspaper columns, opinion articles, blog posts on among other things anti-racism, white supremacy and Dutch media landscape written between 2011–2017 and published mainly on the eponymous online platform Roet in het Eten.  

Program