Marion von Osten: Once We Were Artists

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).

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.

Marion von Osten: Once We Were Artists (A BAK Critical Reader in Artists’ Practice), edited by Maria Hlavajova and Tom Holert, includes contributions by cultural practitioners Kader Attia, Sabeth Buchmann & Judith Hopf, Diedrich Diederichsen, Tom Holert, Brian Kuan Wood, Isabell Lorey, Angela McRobbie, Peter Spillmann, Marina Vishmidt, and Tirdad Zolghadr. The reader is designed by Kummer & Herrman, Utrecht.

On the occasion of the reader's publication, BAK organizes the symposium “Once We Were Artists,” taking place on Saturday, June 24 from 10:30am till 6pm at the Centraal Museum, Utrecht (Agnietenstraat 1). 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, please click here.

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.