Mick Wilson – BAK
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Fellowship

Fellow 2018/2019

Mick Wilson presenting, “What is an Island? Art & Archipelagic Thinking,” Roaringwater Bay, Baltimore, Cork, Ireland, July 2018. Photo: Mary Sullivan

Mick Wilson

Professor Mick Wilson is an artist, educator, and researcher. He has been Head of Valand Academy, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg (2012–2018); Co-Editor-in-Chief of PARSE Journal (2015–2017); and Dean of the Graduate School of Creative Arts & Media, Dublin (2008–2012). He is a visiting faculty member at Bard CCS, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY (2013–ongoing), and in Curatorial Practice at the School of Visual Arts, New York (2014–ongoing). Edited volumes include: How Institutions Think (2017) and The Curatorial Conundrum (2016), both MIT and with Paul O’Neill and Lucy Steeds; Curating Research (2014) and Curating and the Educational Turn (2010), both Open Editions with Paul O’Neill; and SHARE Handbook for Artistic Research Education (2013), ELIA with Schelte van Ruiten. Forthcoming edited volumes include: Public Enquiries: PARK LEK and the Scandinavian Social Turn, Black Dog Press; and Curating After the Global, MIT.

Mick Wilson

Professor Mick Wilson is an artist, educator, and researcher. He has been Head of Valand Academy, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg (2012–2018); Co-Editor-in-Chief of PARSE Journal (2015–2017); and Dean of the Graduate School of Creative Arts & Media, Dublin (2008–2012). He is a visiting faculty member at Bard CCS, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY (2013–ongoing), and in Curatorial Practice at the School of Visual Arts, New York (2014–ongoing). Edited volumes include: How Institutions Think (2017) and The Curatorial Conundrum (2016), both MIT and with Paul O’Neill and Lucy Steeds; Curating Research (2014) and Curating and the Educational Turn (2010), both Open Editions with Paul O’Neill; and SHARE Handbook for Artistic Research Education (2013), ELIA with Schelte van Ruiten. Forthcoming edited volumes include: Public Enquiries: PARK LEK and the Scandinavian Social Turn, Black Dog Press; and Curating After the Global, MIT.

Fellowship Research Trajectory

One of the founding tyrannies of colonial-modernity has been the imposition of a model of self-propriety or self-ownership as the fundamental condition of political personhood. And with it, the whole unfolding horror of private property as the paradigm of social being and social relations. This imposition of regimes of privatized social being is a strategy and technique of colonial capture that allows the dispossession of traditional lands held in common, both in the European homelands of the usurper, and in the killing zones of the colonies. Within the regime of private property, the dead are radically excluded as having no share or claim upon the earth: they have no longer the capacity to own themselves, but have been cast out of the charmed circle of personhood by virtue of becoming mere bodies without self-possession. Artist, educator, and researcher Mick Wilson proposes in his research that the rights-bearing, possessive individual is not a useful structure of resistance, and that exploring the case of the dead may enable and realize a thinking-living otherwise than fascism (without retreating to liberalism).

Propositions for Non-Fascist Living: Tentative and Urgent Published!

BAK has published the first publication in a series on our research trajectory Propositions for Non-Fascist Living (2017–ongoing), Propositions for Non-Fascist Living: Tentative and Urgent (MIT Press, 2019). Moving from critique to propositions, the project attempts to articulate and inhabit methods of de-individualized living and to practice ways in which multiplicity and difference establish relations […]

Jota Mombaça: Visionary Fiction, Activist Writing, and Critical Practices

BAK 2018/2019 Fellows Thiago de Paula Souza and Mick Wilson, along with BAK, co-convene the April 2019 Fellows Intensive focusing on conceptions of violence. Along with screenings, presentations, and discussions curated and conducted by these Fellows, artists, writer, and performer Jota Mombaça joins the Fellows to lead them through collective reading exercises, collaborative writing processes, […]

Program

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Publications

Prospections