Author(s)
Wendelien van Oldenborgh
For this first session of "In Proximity," an ongoing series featured on Prospections, BAK’s Curator of Public Practice Rachael Rakes enters into a conversation with artist and BAK 2017/2018 Fellow Wendelien van Oldenborgh.
In this first session, which connects to Prospections’s inaugural focus of “Tactical Solidarities,” BAK’s Curator of Public Practice Rachael Rakes enters into a conversation with artist and BAK 2017/2018 Fellow Wendelien van Oldenborgh. Van Oldenborgh’s collaborative filmmaking practice often employs intergenerational and cross-cultural engagements in order to rethink and revise recent histories, thereby injecting new imaginaries into the present. These works of deep research, listening, and questioning are in formation and content a practice of social solidarity.
Throughout this session, Van Oldenborgh traces the ideas and compositions of a few recent works, including Two Stones, 2019, which compares the trajectories of Caribbean activist and writer Hermina Huiswoud and German architect Lotte Stam-Beese; From Left to Night, 2019, which looks back at the London riots of 2011, considering the difference between, or lack of difference between, riot and revolt; and Prologue: Squat Anti-Squat, 2016, which illuminates the under-acknowledged history of squatting actions by the Dutch-Caribbean community in 1970s Amsterdam—born out of necessity in response to racist housing policies—and juxtaposes them with more recent local squatting movements.
This conversation took place on 5 June 2020.
Related
BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht stands in solidarity with the Palestinian decolonization struggle and with decolonization efforts everywhere.
This locally-focused second edition of Practicing Tactical Solidarities: A Roundtable on Mutual Aid, Emergency, and Continuous Care took place on 16 December 2020. It featured artists, organizers, and activists working in Utrecht, many of whom were at that time BAK Fellows.
La Colonie opened its doors on rue La Fayette, Paris on 17 October 2016 as a radically open space of discussion and exchange for diverse cultural and political communities.
For this first session of "In Proximity," an ongoing series featured on Prospections, BAK’s Curator of Public Practice Rachael Rakes enters into a conversation with artist and BAK 2017/2018 Fellow Wendelien van Oldenborgh.
A videorecording of the online event Practicing Tactical Solidarities: A Roundtable on Mutual Aid, Emergency, and Continuous Care, livestreamed via Prospections on Wednesday 29 April 2020, 19–21 hrs.
Interviewed and introduced by Irene Calabuch Mirón and Sanne Karssenberg (BAK, basis voor actuele kunst).
From: Trainings for the Not-Yet, an exhibition as a series of trainings for a future of being together otherwise, convened with a multitude of collaborators by Jeanne van Heeswijk and BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht (2019–2020)
From: New World Academy, an alternative learning platform for art and politics established by Jonas Staal and BAK, basis voor actuele kunst (2013–2016).
From FORMER WEST: Art and the Contemporary After 1989, Maria Hlavajova and Simon Sheikh, eds. (Utrecht: BAK, basis voor actuele kunst and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), pp. 379-390.
