grounded directions for a new urban hope

BOOKS

Toward the Not-Yet: Art as Public Practice

Combining handbook, dictionary, and anthology, investigations and examples of artistic practices aimed at social change.

This volume from BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, combines handbook, dictionary, and anthology to investigate artistic practice aimed at achieving social change. With text and visual essays, definitions, exercises, interviews, and images, the contributors envision a praxis that is committed to experimenting with aesthetics and politics in ways that go beyond the conventions of Western modernity. These are practices that are interdisciplinary, theoretically informed, and politically driven, offering ways of “being together otherwise.” Catalyzed by the work of artist Jeanne van Heeswijk, which focuses on radicalizing civic processes, Toward the Not-Yet imagines and enacts alternative ways of conceiving the present and future.

Contributors, among them notable artists, scholars, activists, and writers consider ways of participating in civic life, including “dreamscaping” and “radical listening”; the creation of safer spaces for humans and nonhumans; ways of radically shifting laws and policies; and tactics and methods of collective sanctuary. Toward the Not-Yet is part of BAK's series of BASICS readers, debuting a SUPERBASICS variation that is larger, with more visual content.

Toward the Not-Yet: Art as Public Practice, edited by Jeanne van Heeswijk, Maria Hlavajova, and Rachael Rakes, includes contributions by: Yasmin Ahmed, Grace Lostia, Ying Que, and the basic activist kitchen; Barby Asante; Athena Athanasiou; Clara Balaguer and Gabriel Fontana; Chloë Bass; Aimee Carrillo Rowe; Carolina Caycedo; Merve Bedir; Black Quantum Futurism (Camae Ayewa and Rasheedah Phillips); Dhanveer Singh Brar and Louis Moreno; David Bravo, Miguel Robles-Durán, and Urban Front; Allan deSouza; Nicoline van Harskamp; Adelita Husni-Bey; Rosalba Icaza; Walidah Imarisha; Hamada al-Joumah and Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh; Nancy Jouwe; Elke Krasny; Sandra Lange; Joy Mariama Smith; Francesca Masoero and QANAT; Lorenza Mondada; Lisa Myers; Carmen Papalia; Elizabeth A. Povinelli; Laura Raicovich; Hafiz Rancajale; Jonas Staal; Ultra-red; Françoise Vergès; We are Here; and Carol Zou.

Copublished by MIT Press and BAK (Basis voor Actuele Kunst). For more information, click here.

Gabriela Rendon