Educational platform

21 October 2014–30 May 2015

New World Academy #5: Stateless Democracy

New World Academy #5: Stateless Democracy unfolds as a nomadic learning platform over an extended period of time. Its inaugural session takes place on Tuesday, 21 October 2014, at 19.30 hrs in the form of a conference titled Stateless Democracy: The Revolution in Rojava Kurdistan at De Balie, Amsterdam.

The fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has often been portrayed as a fight between the West and its Arab allies against Islamic ultra-fundamentalists. Over the last several years, however, a progressive Kurdish-led resistance has been forming in Rojava (Syrian Kurdistan) amidst the Syrian Civil War. The resistance has successfully implemented new models of grassroots democracy, gender equality, and sustainable ecology—its members practicing a political project they refer to as Democratic Confederalism. Women and men stand side-by-side in its armed forces in the face of both ISIS and the Bashar al-Assad regime. Despite the resistance’s efforts, Rojava is currently threatened by a massacre, and the international community continues to stand by silently as tragedy unfolds.

New World Academy (NWA) is an educational platform that invites stateless political organizations to exchange with artists and students on the role of art and culture in political struggle. It is established by artist Jonas Staal in collaboration with BAK and functions as a department of the New World Summit, an artistic and political organization dedicated to developing parliaments for organizations banned from democracy. This fifth session of NWA, titled Stateless Democracy, is brought to life with the Kurdish Women’s Movement. Unlike the previous four sessions, NWA #5 is envisioned as a nomadic platform that unfolds over an extended period of time and is realized in collaboration with various individual and institutional partners in Utrecht, the Netherlands, and internationally.

Program

education program
21.10.2014
New World Academy #5: Stateless Democracy: The Revolution in Rojava Kurdistan

book launch
30.05.2015, 20.30 hrs
New World Academy Reader #5: Stateless Democracy

congress
15.–16.10.2015
New World Summit, Rojava

education program
12.–15.01.2016
New World Academy #5: Stateless Democracy

In collaboration with

Suggestions from the archive

Exhibitionary

8 March, 19.00–7 March, 22.00 2024

Yallah Sabaya

Community Portal Hosts… Yallah Sabaya Join us on 8 March 2024 at BAK, Yallah Sabaya is happening again! “Come on ladies, let’s have fun together,” would be a good translation of yallah sabaya. All women of different cultural backgrounds are welcome to dance, chat, and connect with others also through movement and celebration. 8 March 2024, […]

Reading Group

Exhibition

07 March–02 June 2024

Usufructuaries of earth
Chapter one: exhibition

The exhibition foregrounds the artist’s collaborative approach to bringing together ecological, feminist, and decolonial knowledges and practices that put forward ideologies of usufruct, unhinging property-relations from the idiom of individuated possession and toward forms of common userships between humans and other-than-humans.

Convention