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Prospections

18/10/2023
To Read the War


75 years of dispossession. 56 years of occupation. 16 years of blockade.

The BAK 2017/2018 Fellow artist and researcher Isshaq Al-Barbary joins BAK’s Artistic Co-Director Maria Hlavajova and the Utrecht cell of 2023/2024 BAK Fellows for Situated Practice for a conversation on the situation in Palestine. BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht, 16 October 2023, photo: BAK archive

75 years of dispossession.
56 years of occupation.
16 years of blockade.

We at BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht plea for an end to the violence in Palestine and call on artists, cultural and knowledge workers, practitioners in the fields of social action, and all our publics to stand up in solidarity with the struggles of all those who yearn for a world with no hierarchy of human worth.

On 19 October 2023 during the Utrecht demonstration in support of Palestine, we open BAK as a quiet space for rest between 17–23 hrs, Pauwstraat 13a, Utrecht. On Friday 20 October 2023 BAK joins the Global General Strike. Please see our Instagram feed @bakbasis for further tangible actions through which we attempt to reflect and learn together on what solidarity means, in a transversal sense, between how we can meaningfully engage with a practice of undoing colonial logics from where we are as well as ways to join and amplify struggles against the colonial logics that fuel wars the world over.

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To Read the War

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“Scarecrows” is a visual essay by artist Jumana Manna. Here, Manna images daily acts of defiance by Palestinians foraging wild plants for food and medicine; something their survival had depended on for centuries. These humble resistances take place in the face of the legal prohibitions imposed by the State of Israel. The thinly veiled imperialist and racist laws, disguised as preservation decrees protecting plants and other species, are aimed, de facto, against the very possibility of people sustaining their lives on their own lands. “Lands that, in many cases,” Manna stresses, “have been expropriated by the Israeli state and are administered as Israeli settlements, nature reserves, military training areas, and other forms of ‘state land.’” The state here, indeed, continues usurping the power to decide “what is made extinct and what gets to live on; about who gets to decide the fate of these foraging traditions and the options that remain for those who don‘t.”

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19/10/2023

To Read the War

“To Read the War” is an assemblage of texts, visual essays, interviews, conversations, and even entire publications from BAK, basis voor actuele kunst’s archive and beyond. Over the following weeks and months we (re)publish the work of artists, scholars, activists, and cultural practitioners who help us resist the conditions of the world that allow so very few to flourish at the expense of so many that suffer, and in parallel imagine and organize a world in which livable life in common is not only desired but made possible—the world otherwise.

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18/10/2023
To Read the War

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Isshaq Al-Barbary (Campus in Camps), Diego Segatto (Campus in Camps)

In April 2016, BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, brought to life the Here We Are Academy: a spirited temporary recomposition of a refugee-initiated platform for learning called We Are Here Academy. Established in Amsterdam in 2012, We Are Here is the first large-scale organization of refugees living in limbo in the Netherlands. Through projects organized […]

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Kahanoff’s Levantinism: The Anachronic Possibilities of a Concept

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The modern nation-state is supposed to be ethnically and culturally homogenous; after World War II, both Israel’s implementation of Zionism and Arab Nationalism adopted versions of this purism—purging and excluding from the body social what refuses assimilation. After the Six-Day War, the Egyptian-born Israeli writer Jacqueline Kahanoff deployed the notion of Levantinism to challenge the national narrative from a minoritarian perspective informed by her memories of colonial Cairo. In engaging with Kahanoff’s Levantine writings, Eva Meyer and Eran Schaerf seek to re-examine her Levantinism not as a readymade solution, but as a complex and cogent—albeit compromised—problematization of the state as we know it.

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