We are proud to announce another entry in our FEINART Lecture Series. On June 3 at 17:30 BST (18:30 CEST) the FEINART network member Maria Hlavajova of BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht, will present a lecture on ‘From Art Institution to Community Portal’.
Let us think of instituting otherwise as a process of institution-making that unfolds through a succession of interconnected “instituent” events, engaging simultaneously with disruption and sustainability, proximity and distance, and movement and transition. This process presupposes solidarity with a community of cultural practices and forms of life which, driven by a deep disenchantment with the conditions of the collapsing world, holds the institution to account and pressures it to “always newly start again.” Such an art institution to come emerges at the transversal overlaps of art, embodied research, theory, lived experience, memory, fiction, and social action. With a focus on relations and coalitions, it strives to provide space and time for critical engagement with, and commitment to, one another through collective thinking, listening, imagining, learning, and doing. It restores the question of justice back into aesthetics, epistemology, and action. It seeks to peripheralize the western-modern (art) institutionand western-modern hegemony as suchand engage humbly in conversation with other archives of knowledge, other thoughts, and other worlds.
The present, however, defutured by perpetual catastrophes of racial and extractivist capitalism, poses an additional set of challenges. If instituting otherwise is clearly less about institution than about creating conditions for how to be together otherwise, the task ahead is to envision and actualize the pathways toward another future. Could we, then, imagine the art institution as a community portalan interstice, a tiny intervening space of rehearsal for moving between one world and the next, between the present and the not-yet? A porous gateway out of the “normal order of things,” can the portal disrupt the spatial and temporal politics of this “normalcy” to open a (momentary) possibility to leave its unfreedoms behind? Can it be place to mobilize yet unforeseen forms of encounters and otherwise improbable political subjectivities? What can be learned in such encountersthe instances of collective anticipatory learning for and of the not-yet? Which alternative imaginaries will emerge from such being together? And can they be not merely prefigured and rehearsed, but also lived, as if that were possible?
Speaking from within these aesthetico-political experimentations underway at BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht, Maria Hlavajova will share tentative notes that issue from a collective, collaborative process and ongoing conversation within the BAK community. She will further draw on learnings from BAK’s ongoing research itinerary Propositions for Non-Fascist Living (2017ongoing), and in particular the project Trainings for the Not-Yet (20192020), co-convened with artist Jeanne van Heeswijk, as well as a continuing exchange with BAK’s 2020 Fellows.
This lecture can be booked for free via Eventbrite through the following link – Book Tickets