SPECIAL PROGRAMS

RADICAL SOFTNESS 

Call for duos or trios  working of aspects of Radical Softness

Duration RAD 24: Jan 15-Feb29
Open Call: Mid Oct to Mid December, 2023
Special invitation artists: Monika Tobel, Rebekah Dean.

Read more about RAD 24 >>>

Monika Tobel, London

Monika Tobel is a London based Hungarian artist interested in interspecies communication and nature-culture dichotomy. Her work consists of performance, video, and sound alongside installations.   The main focus of her practice is to investigate the possibilities of non-lingual communication between different entities, and the potentials of information exchange via scents, sounds, touch, and movement alongside deep listening practices. She is currently studying for a doctorate at the University of East London.

In a world guided and guarded by rules of phallocentric capitalism softness is radical, caring, listening, giving, and sharing is radical. Despite and because of the teachings of individualism we must form communities, communities built on mutual care for, all be it human or more-than-human. We need to embrace our bodies as multispecies ecosystems and rejoice in the porous nature of the world that allows nutrients, information, and emotions to flow in between diverse life forms.

I feel the way froward is to learn how to interact with all that is around us and within us: using communication methods that supersede language, finding communicative tools in the quiet places of listening, and exchanging information via all the senses. Let’s engage through tactile means, be it by intercepting olfactory messages, listening to the rustles of movement, or touching and allowing to be touched; being open to the messages offered to us by our co-habitants in order to find possibilities of a continuing coexistence through “giving and receiving patterns, dropping threads and failing but sometimes finding something that works, something consequential and maybe even beautiful that wasn’t there before.” (Haraway, 2016)

Through listening, through being attentive it is possible to recognise that we are part of nature and not outside of it, lifting the heavy veil of the dichotomies embedded in modern existence. The lines dividing nature/culture, human/animal, male/female fade away and a deep acknowledgement of belonging arises. With belonging comes responsibility, a necessity for mutual care, which transforms the personal to the political and vice versa.    

 Listening is acknowledging agency and giving power. Listening is opening-up and letting-in, listening is becoming with; listening is mutual transformation. By recognizing agency in all intra-action, power relations shift, kinships arise and communities form. Communities where care and belonging give rise to positive action. Listening is radical softnes

Rebekah Dean, London

I am delighted to be invited back to BKN for the 2024 artist residency ‘Radical Softness’, joined by my appointed London based multidisciplinary artist researcher from Hungary, Monika Tobel. I am a London based woman artist curator, born 1958, working with my ageing, neurodivergent body.

September 2023, I completed a two-weeks funded artist residency with BKN, Sweden, ‘Walking as Practice’. August 2023 group show ‘Mother’s Ruin’ at 35Blumen gallery in Krefeld Germany. August 2023 I was an exhibiting artist in the ‘Artist Support Pledge 3’ exhibition, Huddersfield Art Gallery. March 2023 solo exhibition ‘Discharging Materials’ at ‘The Surgery Gallery’, London.

In March 2023, I led public Walking & Drawing wellbeing workshops, as part of Women’s History month, at The Feminist Library. I have been leading ‘Art for Wellbeing’ a walking and drawing initiative, in partnership with Stephens House & Gardens, since 2018.

I was a funded by The Arts Council England 2020, as Artist Curator of The Sculpture Trail ‘Briefly IN-TRANSIT’; and previously in 2006, Artist Collaboration for the Museum of Domestic Design & Architecture.

MA Fine Art 2000, Middlesex University

BA Fine Art painting 1998, Hertfordshire University

I am interested in how the art making process becomes therapeutic, without being or becoming therapy. My creative practice revolves around the activity of walking, which may or may not produce an artwork. It is the live and virtual spaces of the studio; gallery; theatre; classroom, that become the locations where artists and audiences connect to celebrate the live experience of creative practice, as they touch through eyes; hands; breath; cheeks, and ears.

In one of my favourite essays, an interview with philosopher psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva, by critic and translator Charles Penwarden, written for the Tate exhibition catalogue ‘rites of passage: Art for the end of the Century’ (1995) Kristeva refutes a historical quote by the philosopher, Heideggar, that only religion can save us, with her own understanding: that “only an experience can save us”.

I have been working with the hand process of unpicking a man’s suit, as a way of thinking about questions on gender, capitalism, and climate change. I feel completely powerless...I am burdened by a desire to save the world, to protect everyone! In the name of social prescribing, I prescribe art... remembering the violence that is dragging us all to extinction...what can we do...play?

Studio: 15

Dates: Jan 14-Feb 29, 2024

NORDIC ANALOG NETWORK GRANT

BKN hosted the first to exchange analogue darkroom practitioners from Nordic Analogue Network (NAN) in the spring of 2023.  Resources at BKN >>>

OPEN CALL FOR 2024 has a  deadline for applications on December the 15th 2023. One can not apply to a darkroom in the country where one lives. >>>

The results of the Open Call and selected artists will be announced by the end of January. To be eligible to apply the artist has to be living in one of the Nordic countries; Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Norway or Sweden. The selected artists will be paid a fee of 900€ which is aimed to cover the artist's travel costs, material costs and living expenses during the three-week period of residency. The darkrooms will offer accommodation for the selected artists. 

Open call will be published on bjorkokonstnod.se/bkn and nordicanalognetwork.com

SWAN GRANT

BKN RESPONSE took on the first dissident artist in March 2021 a response to artists freedom of expression. We have continued to do so since then in collaboration with SWAN and Artist at Risk.

The Swedish National Artist Residency Network (SWAN) condemns Russia's war in Ukraine and expresses its solidarity with the Ukrainian people. Culture is an important part of the "democratic reflex" and is central to the freedom of expression and democratization, especially in times of polarization, such as war. Independent artists and cultural workers are vital interpreters and bearers of the freedom of speech. They need to be supported and protected to continue to play a role where democracy is under threat.

Therefore, the members of SWAN are welcoming artists and colleagues who are at war or under threat from an authoritarian regime. Those residencies that can do so, are now adapting to offer so-called "emergency residencies”. This includes support, not only with accommodation and enabling artists to continue their work, but also contacts with the Swedish authorities, crisis support and connecting with local cultural life and fellow artists. SWAN is working to providing resources to offer artists and cultural workers both humanitarian and artistic support based on the needs that they have. >>>