Transmission for Transformation:
On Artistic Pedagogies
and Democracy

Transmission for Transformation: On Artistic Pedagogies and Democracy is part of Institute Art Gender Nature’s annual fall symposium series. This year, Skowhegan was invited to collaborate with Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel FHNW and Culturescapes 2025 Sahara for this two-day event in Basel, Switzerland and online.

Moderated by Chus Martínez and Quinn Latimer with Ruth Estévez (Skowhegan Co-Director) and Kateryna Botanova.

With contributions by Skowhegan artists Daniel Bozhkov, Paul Pfeiffer, and Carmen Winant, alongside Jurriaan Cooiman, Edwige Dro, Wafa Gabsi, Selom Koffi Kudjie, Sadie Plant, Lea Porsager, and Filipa Ramos, among others.

The symposium asks: What is the transformative potential of the transmission of knowledge? Transformation is at once aesthetic and social, poetic and political, yes, but what else?  Today, when academies, universities, and cultural institutions are facing a complex climate, artistic education is more relevant than ever. 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.

The symposium’s participants will include celebrated artists from Skowhegan’s long history, exceptional figures from educational initiatives across Saharan Africa and its diasporas, and those integral to the teaching community of the Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel FHNW. All will consider the role of poetic imagination and artistic solidarity in self-reflective and communal practices. Each will describe those remaining places—real and true—where artists and thinkers might rehearse their imaginations. For all believe in the transformative possibilities of artistic life—one based in the social—as well as those future generations who might further such knowledge.

The symposium is part of the biannual symposia series, ongoing since 2018, curated by Chus Martínez and Quinn Latimer of the Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel FHNW. In February 2026, Transmission for Transformation will have a second iteration at Skowhegan’s program space in New York.

About the Speakers:

Kateryna Botanova is an independent cultural researcher and curator who lives and works between Ukraine and Switzerland. She writes and lectures on ecosystems, decoloniality, and solidarity in societal transformations and cultural practices. She co-curates Culturescapes, for which she has worked with the cultural landscapes of the Amazon and Northern and Western African regions (2019–25).

Daniel Bozhkov is an artist based in New York. He employs a variety of medium in his work, form fresco to performance, and video. In his practice, he often works with professionals from various fields and enters the worlds of genetic science, department megastores, and famous tourist sites as an amateur intruder/visitor.

Juriaan Cooiman is the founder and artistic director of Culturescapes, a biannual cultural festival held in Basel and across Switzerland. After studying at the University of Basel, he has been a festival maker since 1995. He is a board member of the European Festival Association (EFA) and sits on the program committee of ISPA.

Özgür Demerci, in his videos and instalations, brings s poetic aesthetic to a political perspective, exploring memory, testimony, and the trace of the unseen. He is a lecturer at Izmir University of Economics, Faculty of Fine Arts and Design, and currently a resident at Atelier Modial in Basel part of HGK BASEL @ Atelier Mondial, in collaboration with the SAHA Foundation, Istanbul.

Edwige Dro, is a writer, translator, and literary curator from Côte d’Ivoire. She works at the intersection of literature, feminist thought and the arts. She is the founder of 1949, a library in Abidjan of women’s writing  from Africa and the Black world focused on feminist and women-led decolonial practices.

Wafa Gabsi is a researcher, curator and art critic with PhD in Art Sciences from the Cultural Studies Department of pARIS 1 Panthéon -Sorbonne University. She was an assistant professor at the University of architecture  and Design, Tunis, and she has worked as a correspondent for Ibraaz, the editorial platform for African and Moddle Eastern art. In 2020, she founded the contemporary art platform ARCHIVART.

Ruth Estévez is a writer, performer, and curator who develops new artistic fields of knowledge through historical research and interdisciplinary narratives. She is co-director of Skowhegan; visiting professor at MICA’s Rinehart School of Sculpture, Baltimore; and adjunct faculty at the School of Visual Arts curatorial program in New York. She is currently preparing a series of lecture-performances for the Vera List Center, New York.

Selom Koffi Kudjie is the Artistic Director of Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art, in Tamale, Ghana. An artist and curator, he recently organized an exhibit at Nairoby Contemproary Art in Kenya. His own work is informed by drawing, which is  approached as a conceptual medium, and consider as a site to reflect. He is pursuing a PhD in Curatorial Studies, at Kwane Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana.

Paul Pfeiffer is an artist from Honolulu, Hawaii, who lives in New York. He ofter recast the visual language of mass media spectacle to examine how images shape our awareness. Pfeiffer’s work has been shown widely, included at the Whitney Museum of Arts, New York; and Inhotim, Brumandinho, Brazil. His retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2023-2024) traveled to the Guggenheim in Bilbao, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

Sadie Plant is a writer and thinker who teaches in the Contemporary Arts Practice MA at the Hochschule der Künste Bern. She comes from Birmingham, UK, where she published three books in the 1990: The Most Radical Gesture, about the situationists; Zeros and Ones, an alternative feminist history of digital technology; and Writing on Drigs, which discusses the influences  of psychoactive substances on culture. Her latest publication is: Comment lire a bookshelf in einem Buch.

Lea Porsager probes the tension between quantum theory, tantric technologies, and feminist theory, in a practice that spans film, sculpture, text, and earthworks. She holds a PhD from Malmö Art Academy/Lunds University, followed by Mads Øvlisen Postdoc Fellowship. Her exhibitions include Moderna Museet, Stockholm; dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel; and the 14th Istanbul Biennial.

Filipa Ramos, PhD, is a writer and curator whose research focuses on how contemporary art engages with nature. She is lecturer at Institute Art Gender Nature and co-curator of The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish. Recent projects include BESTIARI at the 60th Venice Biennale. Her book, The Artist as Ecologist (2025), pursues art’s engagement with environmental thought and action.

Carmen Winant is an artist and the Roy Lichtenstein Chair of Studio Art at Ohio State University. Her work utilizes archival and authored photographs to examine feminist care networks. Winant is a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow in photography, and a 2021 American Academy of Arts and Letters award recipient. She is also a community organizer, prison educator, and mother.