September 10–November 13, 2022
The Hauntologists is a project that was born out of experimentation and group investigation during the BAK Fellowship for Situated Practice in 2021–2022. From September 10 until December 10, 2022, it takes place in Istanbul, Jakarta, and Utrecht as a continuously evolving and geographically dispersed discursive, performative, publishing, and exhibitionary composition, using “spectrality” as a tactic to investigate and address the brokenness of the world.
Participants include: Özge Açıkkol, Merve Bedir, Kerem Ozan Bayraktar, cell for digital discomfort (Cristina Cochior, Karl Moubarak, and Jara Rocha), Dika+Lija, Philippa Driest, freethought collective, Ilgın Hancıoğlu, Alexandra Karyn, Gayatri Kodikal, Gatari Kusuma, Yen Noh with Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Rifandi Nugroho, İlyas Odman, Marina Papazyan, Anitha Silvia, and Zone Collective (Megan Hoetger and Kirila Cvetkovska), among others.
Many people now find themselves tormented by the world’s enduring brokenness—inequality, war, violence against people of color and women, precarity, techno-colonialism, and other enduring challenges. Can one “haunt” back to act and put an end to this pervasive feeling of dread? Could we accept “spectrality” as a political and cultural sensibility to play with? Is it possible to conduct research as a “haunting” in order to go over the limitations of conventional knowledge categories, knowledge production, and so-called artistic research?
The Hauntologists, a collaborative project by the 2021–2022 BAK Fellows, is based on these questions and attempts to test how various notions of spectrality and spectral tactics could engage with or fathom potential developing futures, contested methods for leading liveable lives, and unresolved tensions in troubled archives and languages, among other things. The BAK Fellows and their guests—”the hauntologists”—look for vocabulary that dismantle the abstract social forms that prevent political imagination and agency by residing between meetings, seminars, subcultures, and ordinary moments. Additionally, they are dedicated to putting forth aesthetico-political perspectives that create opportunities for collective action through practicing fresh paradigms for interpretation, reading, and sociality. The Hauntologists, who provide a framework for a variety of artistic practices, are not just haunted; they also haunt.
The BAK Fellowship for Situated Practice is formed in three distinct cities: Utrecht at BAK from September 10–November 13, 2022; Istanbul from November 18–20, 2022; and Jakarta at Gudskul from November 26–December 10, 2022. The program’s elements are dispersed in a situational, staggered manner across the various geographic locales as well as on BAK’s online forum Prospections because it was conceptualized as an unfolding score.
The Hauntologists is put together by Julia Morandeira, convener of the Utrecht cell and curator of the post-academic program BAK Fellowship for Situated Practice, in collaboration with the local conveners: Zeyno Pekünlü, Istanbul cell hosted by the Istanbul Biennial Production and Research Programme, İKSV; Gesyada Siregar and Angga Wijaya, Gudsel hosted by Gudskul in Jakarta; and the 2021 Le Guess Who? event in Utrecht and the freethought collective are only a couple of the many collaborators.
Join us for the opening and a warm welcome from Morandeira on Saturday, September 10, 2022 at 4pm CEST at BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht.
A federated institutional collaboration between research cells at BAK (Utrecht), Gudskul (Jakarta), the Istanbul Biennial Production and Research Programme at İKSV (Istanbul), and online has enabled the realization of the 2021–2022 BAK Fellowship for Situated Practice. The conceptual framework was created in tandem with the freethought collective’s “Spectral Infrastructure” research program.
The operations of BAK have been made possible by financial support from the City of Utrecht and the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture, and Science. The Hauntologists was made possible by additional financial support from the Marinus Plantema Foundation, the Arts Council Korea working with ISAC, the international partnership supporting the creation of arts, and the Programme for the Internationalization of Spanish Culture (PICE) granted by AC/E – Acción Cultural Espaola.
BAK’s main partner in the field of education and research is HKU University of the Arts, Utrecht.
BAK, basis voor actuele kunst
Pauwstraat 13a
3512 TG Utrecht
The Netherlands
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