Transmission for Transformation: On Artistic Pedagogies and Democracy

A collaboration of Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel FHNW, Skowhegan School of

Painting & Sculpture, and Culturescapes 2025 Sahara

The symposium is open to the public and will be held in English.

Free admission

More information and program: dertank.ch

skowheganart.org

culturescapes.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. True transformation rarely occurs in isolation. Nor does art. As Edward Said once noted, paraphrasing T. S. Eliot: “No artist of any art has his complete meaning alone.” Thus for Institute Art Gender Nature’s fall symposium at the Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW, in Switzerland, we are partnering with two cultural institutions devoted to artistic education in its abundant guises and geographies. Skowhegan was founded in 1946 in the United States by a group of artists, and its alternative art school in Maine remains devoted and governed by artists; Culturescapes, a transdisciplinary Swiss arts festival dedicated to intercultural exchange, is engaged in a four-year program devoted to the Saharan region, its cultural practices, diverse epistemologies, and political histories and futures. Together with them—namely Ruth Estévez, co-director of Skowhegan, and Kateryna Botanova, co-curator of Culturescapes—Institute Art Gender Nature will dedicate its autumn symposium to the artistic transmissions and transformations that happen both inside and outside the institution. Art schools—whether public and within a state academic system, like HGK Basel FHNW, or privately organized, like Skowhegan and Culturescapes—are structured around ideas of community and its culture, both ongoing and newly created every term. In an era when the social is placed under such expert political pressure, and when community building is often antithetical to the very systems in which we live and work, how might we teach collective practices as much as the transfer of knowledge and artistic techniques, so as to ensure that the students leave our institutions with this set of democratic skills and priorities, both as an ethos and a practice? Too, how might we bring language and practice in alignment within our academic environments, so that one does not supersede the other? In the academies, as in contemporary culture at large, there is often a real pressure to perfect a certain language—political, artistic, technical—while the very practices that such languages speak to seem to disappear. How can teaching install the importance of their alliance, making room for ambiguity, uncertainty, and opacity, so that the projection of false authority of knowledge production is instead replaced with the complications of practice and learning in real time? That said, the conceptual utility of artistic systems habitually dictates how we should discuss and present art. The instrumental reason emphasizes the effectiveness of images and words based on what one believes an audience to expect. Similarly, the art market dictates artistic formulas, as biennials and museums increasingly align with a capitalist system that favors funds over ideas. What is the role, then, of poetic imagination in terms of self-reflective and communal practices and sensibilities? Is it possible to develop alternative forms of art production that transcend the market and the competitive mechanisms that are imposed on art academies and spaces? Are there any remaining places—real and true—for artists to rehearse their imaginations? We believe, fervently, that art schools and education initiatives—in all their myriad forms and experimental factors—are such a space. 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 and Switzerland at large. Artist, thinkers, poets, filmmakers, performers, educators, curators: all will consider the role of artistic solidarity and the transmission of knowledge in selfreflective and communal practices. For all believe in the transformative possibilities of artistic life— one based in the social—as well as in those future generations who might further such knowledge. Transmission for Transformation is part of the biannual symposia series, ongoing since 2018, curated by Chus Martínez and Quinn Latimer of the Institute Art Gender Nature. In February 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 will feature 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.