Symposium: No Linear Fucking Time

Friday, May 20, 4:30–10pm
Saturday, May 21, 10am–10pm

BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht proudly presents Symposium: No Linear Fucking Time. Coinciding with the exhibition closing of No Linear Fucking Time, this two-day symposium, taking place on-site at BAK and online, gathers several methods of thinking and practice geared toward equitable and sustainable socio-temporal models. In keeping with the motivation of the overall project, which is grounded in understanding and challenging progressive, abstract, and “western” formulations of time, the symposium engages with the histories of linear time in concert with various alternative scales that manifest across different lived experiences. Temporal concepts like seed time, space-time, visionary fiction, anticolonial agencies, and ancestral presents mingle here with historical, industrial, and financial hauntings. The presentations also grapple with contemporary urgencies such as refugee and border time, debt, the blurred boundaries between labor time and rest, and ecological extraction.

Organized in several presentation formats, the symposium features contributions from: Isshaq Al-Barbary (artist and researcher, Amsterdam), Merve Bedir (architect and researcher, Rotterdam), Olga Bryukhovetska (cultural theorist, Kyiv), Andrea Elera (artist and curator, Amsterdam), Elvira Espejo Ayca (artist and poet, La Paz), Max Haiven (writer and educator, Lakehead Bay), Nicoline van Harskamp (artist, Amsterdam), Jeanne van Heeswijk (artist, Rotterdam), Femke Herregraven (artist, Amsterdam), Walidah Imarisha (educator, writer, and artist, Portland), Jerrau (DJ, Amsterdam), Jumana Manna (artist, Berlin), Claudia Mártinez Garay (artist, Amsterdam), Natasha Matteson (curator and director of Afghan Refugee Resettlement at Uplift Afghanistan Fund, New York), Jason-Allen Paisant (poet, researcher, and educator, Leeds), Yuri Pattison (artist, Paris), Amanda Piña (artist, Vienna and Mexico City), Susan Schuppli (artist and researcher, London), Timur Si-Qin (artist, New York), Rolando Vázquez (writer and educator, Utrecht), and Evelyn Wan (researcher, Utrecht), among others.

The symposium also includes, on Friday, May 20, the public launch of Toward the Not-Yet: Art as Public Practice (2021, BAK/MIT Press). Edited by Jeanne van Heeswijk, Maria Hlavajova, and Rachael Rakes, the publication gathers artistic and cultural practices that are future-oriented, yet abandon a “universal” progressive route forward, instead enlivening a different chronopolitics: that of the not-yet. 

No Linear Fucking Time
No Linear Fucking Time (December 3, 2021–May 22, 2022) is an exhibition with gatherings, an online publication, and a symposium. The project proposes to unsettle dominant temporalities and model alternate forms of livable time. Convened by BAK’s curator of public practice Rachael Rakes with artist-interlocutors Femke Herregraven, Jumana Manna, and Claudia Martínez Garay, as well as writer Amelia Groom, No Linear Fucking Time calls upon a wide range of practitioners who examine and embody alternate scales, rhythms, and conceptions of temporal experience in order to explore how looking and working beyond linear, progressive, and globally-synchronized time can contribute to a more plurally-determined and sustainable lives. The project posits that just as time has been a homogenizing imperial force, the rethinking of time can be a key function of anti-colonial presents. 

More information on the symposium and how to get tickets can be found here.

More information on the exhibition can be found here. 

You can read the online publication Prospections focus on No Linear Fucking Time here.

Project support: The realization of this project has been made possible with the financial support of the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture, and Science; the City of Utrecht; and Stichting Zabawas, The Hague. BAK’s main partner in the field of education and research is HKU University of the Arts Utrecht, Utrecht.