On Thursday the 11th we received a tour with BAK curator, Cosmin Costinas of the exhibition ‘Vectors of the Possible’ curated by Simon Sheikh. In the exhibition guide he asks, ‘Isn’t is so, that a work of art, and certainly an exhibition, always sets up an horizon, a proposal of what can be imagined and what cannot? At stake is what imagination of the future and past is proposed: how a work of art produces other imaginaries of the world and its institutions, rather than merely reiterating already existing ones, even in so-called critical terms (i.e. affirmative critique). It is a question of horizon.’
On Friday we were back at BAK for a day seminar with Nancy Adajania, independent curator and cultural theorist and Ranjit Hoskote, poet, cultural theorist and independent curator, both based in Mumbai. Presently they are finishing up their 3-month residency as research scholars at BAK/Basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht. The lecture defined what they meant by ‘nth fields’: places, spaces, context all over the world where interlocutors and collaborators work together. ‘All nth fields have similar structural, spatial and temporal characteristics. In structural terms, these are receptive and internally flexible institutions, rhizomatic and self-sustaining associations, or periodic platforms. In spatial terms, these are either programmatically nomadic in the way they manifest themselves, or extend themselves through often unpredictable transregional initiatives, or are geographically situated in sites to which none (or few) of their participants are affiliated by citizenship or residence. Temporally, the rhythm of these engagements is varied: it traverses a range of untested encounters, from face-to-face meetings and discussions through email and Skype, and can integrate multiple time lines for conception and production.’
Their presentation condensed the ‘post-canonical, post-historical and post-colonial’ into a two-hour lecture which interwove art of the past century in relation to the socio-political global context. Focusing on key figures and introducing specific terminology were the order of the day. This is relation to their present contribution to ‘Dispatch’ that informs their most recent project ‘Notes towards a lexicon of urgencies’.
In the afternoon participants of Negotiating Equity presented examples of the ‘transcultural’ and we watched Nina Fischer & Maroan el Sani’s ‘Spelling Dystopia’ http://www.fischerelsani.net/selected.html along with an excerpt of the Yes Men’s performance on BBC concerning the Bhopal disaster and the consequences of their intervention.
