In the time of permacrisis - think the brutal forever war on Ukraine and many other wars the world over, including the war on climate and thus on the very possibility of livable life in common—what art, what subjects, what sort of being together must we create?
Thinking through a number of concrete art projects and art practices, from Former West (2008-2016) to Propositions for Non-Fascist Living (2016-ongoing) to Trainings for the Not-Yet (2019-2020), Maria Hlavajova ponders on the meaning of art vis-a-vis the conditions of today that resign to neither false hope nor to paralyzing despair.
Hlavajova envisions a possibility of art as radical, speculative, public pedagogy geared at learning to be together otherwise: that is, a pedagogy of collective worldmaking that involves learning with one another what does not yet exist, and then living that new knowledge, that newly envisioned world, “as if it were possible.”
Maria Hlavajova is the founder and artistic director of BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht since 2000, and artistic director of FORMER WEST (2008–2016), which she initiated and developed as an international collaborative research, education, publication, and exhibition undertaking. From 2008-2016 she was the research and artistic director of the collaborative research, exhibition and education project FORMER WEST, which culminated in the publication Former West: Art and the Contemporary After 1989. Her curatorial work includes Call the Witness, Roma Pavilion, 54. Venice Biennale, 2011; Citizens and Subjects, Dutch Pavilion, 52. Venice Biennale, 2007; and Borderline Syndrome: Energies of Defence, Manifesta 3, Ljubljana, 2000. He is a lecturer at HKU University of the Arts, Utrecht. In addition to the above, she is co-founder of the tranzit.org network. She was a member of the Supervisory Board of the European Cultural Foundation, Amsterdam, and of the Advisory Boards of Assembly Bergen, Bergen and IMAGINART Imagining Institution Otherwise: art, politics and state transformation, University of Amsterdam. He lives and works in Amsterdam and Utrecht.
