Intro

BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht and Valiz, Amsterdam are proud to announce the release of Marion von Osten: Once We Were Artists (A BAK Critical Reader in Artists’ Practice). To mark the launch of the publication, the symposium “Once We Were Artists” takes place on Saturday 24 June 2017 from 10.30 till 18.00 hrs at the Centraal Museum, Utrecht (Agnietenstraat 1).

The reader critically maps the political commitment of von Osten’s influential work to feminism, theories of labor, knowledge production, education, and (post)coloniality. Von Osten’s practice systematically escapes strictures of canonization by scrutinizing, obstructing, and unsettling divisions categorizing art, art object, history making, theory, authority, curating, organizing, and teaching, opening up routes to radical re-readings of the contemporary. The contributions to this book discuss some of the many aspects of this situated, collaborative, process-oriented work so as to provide a locus from which to further engage her transversal practice, as well as the subject of the artist at present.

On the occasion of the reader’s publication, BAK organizes the symposium “Once We Were Artists,” taking place on Saturday 24 June 2017 from 10.30 till 18.00 hrs at the Centraal Museum, Utrecht (Agnietenstraat 1). The symposium addresses the shifting nature of artistic practices that lay claim to the public sphere and political space, and a collaborative, process-oriented ethos that revolves around issues of feminism, migration, education, and (post)coloniality. Contributors include E. C. Feiss (writer, Berkeley), Tom Holert (art historian, curator, and writer, Berlin), Sven Lütticken (writer and curator, Utrecht), Marion von Osten (cultural producer, Berlin), Maria Papadimitriou (artist, Athens), Farid Rakun (artist, writer, editor, and teacher, member of ruangrupa, Jakarta), and Joanna Warsza (curator, Berlin).

To register for the symposium (€8 per ticket and €6 for students, including lunch), please click here.

On view at BAK from 24 June till 9 July is ABiotic Factors, the MaHKU (Utrecht Graduate School of Visual Art and Design, Utrecht) graduation show, curated by von Osten.

To order a copy of Marion von Osten: Once We Were Artists (A BAK Critical Reader in Artists’ Practice), please e-mail info@bakonline.org or visit the website of Valiz.