ALT(ering) + SHIFT(ing) + COMM(uning): Casco Art Institute
Tuesday, April 27, 2021
ALT(ering) + SHIFT(ing) + COMM(uning) welcomes Staci Bu Shea and Binna Choi for a conversation on Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons.
Casco Art Institute (Utrecht, Netherlands) dedicates itself to cultivating and sustaining the commons through art, questioning its forms of life, shared resources, customs and borders. Art offers a lens through which to look at the commons whilst the commons look to the world, including art. Casco Art Institute works closely with artists by presenting art to create different worlds, now and into the future, and to study, situate and mediate art in relation to the field of the commons. This means, above all, working closely with diverse communities.
Staci Bu Shea is a curator and writer living in Utrecht. They focus on aesthetic and poetic practices of social reproduction and care work, as well as its manifestations in interpersonal relationships and daily life, community organizing and institutional practice. Since 2017, Staci has been curator at Casco Art Institute. Before this, Staci co-curated Barbara Hammer: Evidentiary Bodies (2017) at Leslie Lohman Museum of Art (NY) with Carmel Curtis, and graduated from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College with the group exhibition Emphasis Repeats (2016) at Hessel Museum of Art (NY). They’re also an end-of-life planner and hospice volunteer.
Binna Choi is the director at Casco Art Institute, where she engages with both its artistic program and the organizational and (de)instituting practice as her curatorial and collaborative art practice. Travelling Farm Museum of Forgotten Skills with the Outsiders, Site for Unlearning (Art Organization) with Annette Krauss and the Casco team, are some of her recent or ongoing curatorial works. She has also been working on restructuring and rearticulating the institution itself with the Casco team, the ecosystem and the annual Assembly. In her earlier work at Casco, she conceived the long-term transdisciplinary project Grand Domestic Revolution (2010-2012) and the multi-faceted program Composing the Commons (2013-2016). Besides this, Binna is a member of Akademie der Künste der Welt in Köln, where, in close collaboration with Christian Nyampeta in 2020, she curated Gwangju Lessons over the 18 May Democratic Uprising and subsequenly presented it at the Asia Culture Center as part of the MaytoDay project by the Gwangju Biennale Foundation. In 2016, she was curator for the 11th Gwangju Biennale. She has also been serving as an advisor to the Afield Network and a board member for Green Art Lab Alliance Support.
