Josephine Baan

Josephine Baan (also goes by the names Joseph, Jo, or any variation thereof) is an artist and educator whose practice engages in art, education and collaboration as ways to forge creative resurgence. They’re interested in the complexities of collectivity and in the possibility of establishing a solidarity that does not homogenise, but affirms difference. Their current research investigates the political currency of incoherence and illegibility within performance practice, asking what aspects of performance might angle towards liberation or abolishing the constraints that one is born into. They are also engaged in developing a performance-based pedagogy which incorporates embodied learning, incoherence, and queerness as tools for collective worlding.

Josephine performs with their body and voice and makes installations, props, scripts and choreographies that explore the spaces and relationships between the flesh and the word, human and non-human bodies, and change and preservation. Materially and performatively thinking between things, beings and situations, they consciously switch perspective to influence roles and readings of power and control in relation to affection and gestures of care. They use speculative fiction and storytelling as tools to invade existing narratives that naturalize normative states of sex, gender, race, ecology, and the hierarchies between them.

Their practice is closely linked to their work as an educator, which is influenced by radical pedagogy and non-hierarchical collaborative methods. They are a founding member of Rotterdam based educational collective sohere, and between 2019 and 2022 they co-ran Zurich based School of Commons; a grassroots initiative dedicated to the study and development of decentered knowledge, with a focus on practices of self-organised learning and commoning. They are especially dedicated to creating safer, more inclusive, and more accessible environments for learning, working, and living together.

They obtained their MFA at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2015. They are a resident of the ENOA Immersive Opera residency 2021-2022 and a recipient of the Werkbeitrag Fachstelle Kultur prize of the province of Zürich 2021. Recent exhibitions and performances include: Burner at LIFE, Rotterdam (2022); Weathering at Titanik Galleria in Turku (2021); Werkschau at Haus Konstruktiv in Zürich (2021); Weathering at SIC in Helsinki (2021); The Opposite of a Cynic [Tongue] at Nieuw & Meer in Amsterdam (2020); inter:archiveat OnCurating in Zürich (2020); Here Not Here at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin (2019); MOTH at Museum KKLB in Beromünster (2018 – 2019); A Brief History of Becoming Rock at Art Rotterdam in Rotterdam (2018); Nothing 2 C Here at Alkovi Galleria in Helsinki (2017).