Throughout 2023 and 2024, BAK’s Fellows in Utrecht and Istanbul engaged in both individual and collective artistic research, fostering dialogue and exchanging practices across a shared inquiry into refusal, non-alignment, and institutional imagination. Rooted in the entangled dynamics of identity, care, and power, the cohort critically explored strategies of disengagement from dominant structures—rethinking forms of participation beyond normative frameworks of productivity, nationalism, and institutional allegiance.
A central concern within this collective process was the notion of the “national”—reframed not as a stable identity, but as a contested geopolitical terrain that shapes questions of organization, positionality, and solidarity. Across diverse practices, Fellows traced how cultural labour can enact forms of resistance by activating alternative genealogies, care structures, and epistemologies that unsettle imposed boundaries and hegemonic narratives.

Andrea Knezović’s LUMEN TEMPUS – Bargaining Beyond Rest: The Constellations Series contributed to this discourse by focusing on the politics of rest and non-alignment within the pressures of cognitive capitalism. Through fabulatory diagrams and autoethnographic scores, the work mapped the friction between personal endurance and systemic exhaustion, while resisting the rhetoric of productivity and institutional pragmatism. It proposed refusal, slowness, and speculative care as counter-strategies, pointing toward other ways of inhabiting time, labour, and collectivity.

The public was invited to encounter the multiplicity of perspectives shaped during this intensive period of artistic research through a series of conversations, workshops, performances, exhibitions and multimedia works—each offering new constellations of thought, resistance, and shared imagination.