Fall Symposium – Transmission for Transformation: On Artistic Pedagogies and Democracy

Fall Symposium
13 – 14 November 2025
On-site and online
Auditorium D 1.04, Tower Building, HGK Basel FHNW

As part of the symposium series Gender and Equality in the Arts

With contributions by Daniel Bozhkov, Özgür Demirci, Edwige Dro, Wafa Gabsi, Selom Koffi Kudjie, Paul Pfeiffer, Sadie Plant, Lea Porsager, Filipa Ramos, and Carmen Winant

Moderated by Chus Martínez and Quinn Latimer
with Ruth Estévez and Kateryna Botanova

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.

The program will be announced soon.

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.