Propositions #13: Mobilization and (In)Visibility
Datum en tijd
Locatie
Online evenement
Propositions #13: Mobilization and (In)Visibility is an online assembly and public forum organized by BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht
Over dit evenement
Propositions #13: Mobilization and (In)Visibility is an online assembly and public forum. Aligning with the planned closing days of exhibition Tony Cokes: To Live as Equals (which has prematurely closed due to the Covid-19 lockdown measures in the Netherlands), and the ongoing “How to Assemble Now,” the current focus of BAK’s online forum Prospections, the program engages the aesthetics, praxis, and theories of refusal, insurrection, organizing, and mediation during this pivotal political moment.
The title of the exhibition, To Live as Equals, derives from Cokes’s video Evil.27: Selma (2011). The work–employing text by the collective Our Literal Speed about imagination in the Civil Rights Movement–considers how the instant mediation of protest and resistance might foreclose possibilities for ideating equitable forms of social organization. The proposition in the title “How to Assemble Now,” echoes an enduring enunciation that has taken a distinct tenor in pandemic times. The contributions to this focus of Prospections consider how to rework international and local relations into forms of connection that rely on neither the nation-state nor global neoliberal production, but rather on a nodal basis of specific local concerns within a network of planetary solidarities. Its opening editorial asks: how to work beyond the purported opposition between physical distancing and the necessity to mobilize, envision, and practice proximity and affinity, through comradeship, and continue to be accomplices or co-conspirators to ways of being together otherwise?
With these intersecting prompts, and thinking of the newly-regenerated pockets and coalitions of creative, propositional resistance that have appeared amid this year of globally-impacting (though unequally distributed) hardship, Propositions #13 presents and questions modes and tactics of mobilization now, including: how to gather in a pandemic and post-pandemic (or between pandemic) environments; how and why to avoid detection, contradictions of public visibility, aesthetics of resistance, image production and reproduction; and what strikes or other acts of refusal could look like in these contexts.
Propositions #13 opens as an assembly with a series of consecutive brief lectures, readings, visual, and performative gestures by artists, activists, and researchers, and then culminates in an online public forum.
With contributions by: Barby Asante (artist, curator, educator, London), Tony Cokes (artist, Providence), Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh (artist and researcher), Jesal Kapadia (artist, educator, organizer, New York), MTL Collective (Amin Husain and Nitasha Dhillon, artists and organizers, New York), Massimiliano Mollona (anthropologist and filmmaker, London), Serubiri Moses (curator and writer, New York), Rachael Rakes (Curator of Public Practice, BAK basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht), Irit Rogoff (writer, teacher, curator, and organizer, London), and Caitlin Schaap (artist and organizer, Kick Out Zwarte Piet, Netherlands).
Full program
Times subject to change. All times CET
15.00–15.20 hrs
INTRODUCTION
Assembling
Rachael Rakes
15.20–15.40 hrs
READING
Now is the Time for the Performance to Become Reality (I can’t do this without you)
Barby Asante
15.40–16.00 hrs
LECTURE
Images, Anti-fascism, and Decolonial Freedom: Cinema as Assembly
Massimiliano Mollona
16.00–16.20 hrs
PRESENTATION
Mobilizing Against Anti-Black Racism with Kick Out Zwarte Piet
Caitlin Schaap
16.20–16.40 hrs
PRESENTATION
Images, Silence, and (In)visibility in Western Sahara’s Struggle for Liberation and Self-Determination
Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh
16.40–16.45 hrs
BREAK
16.45–16.50 hrs
INTRODUCTION, PART II
Rachael Rakes
16.50–17.10 hrs
PERFORMANCE
From The Grand Central Singing Telegram Co.
Pablo Helguera
17.10–17.30 hrs
PRESENTATION
Training in the Practice of Freedom
MTL Collective
17.30–17.50 hrs
LECTURE
Horror and Other Fantasies: Fanon's Theory of Postcolonial Violence on Screen
Serubiri Moses
17.50–18.10 hrs
LECTURE
The Unarchivable
Irit Rogoff
18.10–18.30 hrs
PRESENTATION
Outro: To Live as Equals
Tony Cokes
18.30–18.45 hrs
BREAK
18.45–18.50 hrs
INTRODUCTION TO PUBLIC FORUM
Rachael Rakes
18.50–19.00 hrs
ASSEMBLY REFLECTIONS
Jesal Kapadia
19.00–20.30 hrs
FORUM