Transmission for Transformation: On Artistic Pedagogies and Democracy

With contributions by Daniel Bozhkov, Özgür Demirci, Edwige Dro, Wafa Gabsi, Selom Koffi Kudjie, Paul Pfeiffer, Sadie Plant, Lea Porsager, Filipa Ramos, and Carmen Winant. Moderated by Chus Martínez and Quinn Latimer with Ruth Estévez and Kateryna Botanova. Research: Marion Ritzmann.

A collaboration of Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel FHNW, Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, and Culturescapes 2025 Sahara.

On-site: Auditorium D 1.04, HGK Basel FHWN, and livestream.

“Transmission for Transformation: On Artistic Pedagogies and Democracy” is part of the symposium series "Gender and Equality in the Arts".

The symposium is open to the public and will be held in English. Free admission. More information and program: dertank.ch.

What is the transformative potential of the transmission of knowledge? Transformation at once aesthetic and social, poetic and political, yes, but what else? In a global moment when academies, universities, and cultural institutions are being assailed and defunded by increasingly anti-democratic regimes across the world, the radical importance of artistic education must reassert itself. For its transformative potential is not just for the artists within its systems, but for democratic society and its wildly vulnerable structures at large. Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel FHNW, in collaboration with Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture and Culturescapes 2025 Sahara, will thus dedicate its fall symposium to artistic transmission and transformation writ large, and to the production of pedagogies that can resist the anti-intellectual, supremacist political forces of the present. To create and sustain environments in which artistic practices are nurtured and centered on transformation—across generations and geographies—this is our aim. 

The symposium’s participants will include celebrated artists from Skowhegan’s long history, exceptional figures from artistic and educational initiatives across Saharan Africa and its diasporas, and those integral to the teaching community of the Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel FHNW. All will consider the role of poetic imagination and artistic solidarity in self-reflective and communal practices. Each will describe those remaining places—real and true—where artists and thinkers might rehearse their imaginations. For all believe in the transformative possibilities of artistic life—one based in the social—as well as those future generations who might further such knowledge. 

The symposium is part of the biannual symposia series, ongoing since 2018, curated by Chus Martínez and Quinn Latimer of the Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel FHNW. In 2026, Transmission for Transformation will have a second iteration at Skowhegan’s program space in New York. The symposium also acts in concordance with the forthcoming HGK Basel FHNW book, Desire for Transmission: On Movements of Materials and Knowledges (Christoph Merian Verlag, 2026). The second volume in the Basel Dialogues critical book series, edited by Claudia Perren and Quinn Latimer, Desire for Transmission features conversations from the HGK Basel FHNW’s lecturers and guests on issues of artistic and political transformation, and technologies of transmission, image production, and justice.

The symposium is dedicated to the memory of Refaat Alareer.

Press contact: Institute Art Gender Nature, Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW, Anna Francke, email, +41 61 228 43 25