PROGRAMS

WAP24

ALL WAP24 artists >>>

JOHN SCHUERMAN

Lead Walker/Co-curator,  May- June

John Schuerman is an environmental artist and independent curator. His artwork reflects his deep interest in nature both human and nonhuman. His aesthetic style and social consciousness formed as he grew up on a dairy farm in southern Wisconsin. His primary art practices are Walking and Drawing, which he uses to examine his community’s physical and psychic landscapes. As a curator he’s produced over 30 exhibitions across the Midwest on topics that address current concerns in our collective psyche.

Studio: tba
Dates: Mid May through June

Img below are from some of Schuermans walking projects

Purchases from every food store on E. Lake St. 

I Walked There and Back 

Drawing of me and my friend Sandy Spieler who did the E Lake St food walk with me

Rickshaw walk in Milwaukee Lois Bielefeld pulling, me riding 

Walk plan for walks around the lowest and highest income neighborhoods in Minneapolis, MN.

Lead Walker/Co-curator, August - September

Antonia Aitken based in lutruwita /Tasmania, Australia  since 2014.  Through a combination of field research and studio based practice my work is investigating social and environmental questions about how we engage with and interpret our relationships with place in a contemporary Australian context. How do we explore the complex and entangled imprint of settler colonialism and attempt to build ethical dialogue with the land and its communities.

RADICAL SOFTNESS 

MOSSS

Moving Observations on Surviving Soft Skills - MOSSS - is a nomad cross disciplinar research project aiming at creating space of encounters and co-learning with humxns and more-than-humxns. We serve the purpose of facilitating performative workshops that act as plateforms for generating new tools and scores for survival and the survival of endangered species or ecosystems. Transdisciplinarity is a language we thrive through, we consider its approach as a practice to understanding the milieu in its complex web of interconnections and variety of languages and a pathway to convey and foster new possible narratives by creating spaces of dialogue.

Through explorative walks and deep listening, we share tools and methodology for co-creation with the humxns and more-than-humxns through transdisciplinary approaches (fiction, somatic, design, scientific). We propose scores for witnessing, deep and radical listening to meet one another and disrupt our common ways of interacting. Storytelling and futurology are keys for our practice to encounter the living and transcend these encounters for an audience and foster new ways of relating. Driven by the need to respond to the current crises and answer the question: how can we co-create and experiment with new ways of doing and being in the world?, the questions we want to raise is: how to build up a relationship with someone, something, a place?

We develop hybrid forms of workshops where the boundaries between shared experience, scientific knowledge and fiction become intertwined. We want to offer experiences that shift, inspire and question what's there, creating a direct exchange between the space and whoever encounters and inhabits it.

We are currently focused on a hybrid piece in co-creation process with mosses, living ancestral organisms that can teach us ways to adapt, to care and collaborate, through radical explorations and collaboration in Belgium and France. Within BKN Radical Softness residency we will emphasize these weeks of research on embodied somatic practices inspired by our sensory encounters with mosses and the ecosystems we’re gravitating in. We will propose a try out of these researches as a form of collective vermicomposting.
MOSSS is composed by Mélanie Ganino, transdisciplinar architect and designer, and Sarah Drapeau, systemic artist-ingeneer and facilitator. They met through the Common Dreams School eco-pedagogical project led by Maria Lucia Cruz Correia and started their collaboration and what became life exploration through the creation of the Radical Survival Toolkit in 2021.
Studio 3 + 5
Dates Feb 4-29

MONIKA TOBEL

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

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

ZOEY HART, Brooklyn, NY, USA
Will host remote (video) presentations/workshops on softness. Hart is an interdisciplinary artist, educator and collaborator living with chronic illness, mostly based in Brooklyn, NY. Driven by the frictions between invisible disability and modern medicine, visual/performative practice re-centers the notion of what constitutes well-being in changing social and environmental contexts. 

Hart has been at AiR BKN two times during the second she was in an process based exhibition curated by Anna Viola Hallberg, "The Sea That Surrounds Us"

"My life and work continue to be co-informed by the process of navigating disability through inaccessible terrain." ZH

Studio: non (remote participation)