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From the outset, the exhibition unfolds with a shared attentiveness to how the works inhabit the space. Rather than striving for polished cohesion, each contribution seems to claim its own ground—creating a terrain of subtle overlaps and tensions. Viewers are invited to navigate these proximities, to linger in the frictions between the tactile and the ephemeral. Materials span a wide spectrum—from raw and organic like wood and stones to high-tech and synthetic like blocks, receipt printers (in the land of the “pin only”) and tablets—mirroring the multiplicity of our current condition. Technologies, far from being deployed as flashy tools, are engaged critically: not as ends, but as means for questioning, unsettling, and perhaps orienting. One senses that the works are rooted in long, sometimes tense conversations—between students, tutors, and collaborators—over the course of the two-year program. Time here is not progressive, nor innocent, but cyclical and fractured. In other words, the works are not conclusions, but continuations, threads in a larger unfolding.

During the visit, a thought keeps returning: the expectation to encounter the ‘ludic’ (needed to be in juxtaposition to the often contradictory morality from academia) in all its ‘violent’ forms—where ‘violent’ means, simply, unapologetically human. Beyond any attempt to rationalize what defines us as human beings, the exhibition presents itself as an open proposition—a space to reflect on what might be understood as our times, approached through diverse forms and sensibilities.

Sohrab Kashani’s The Transmission Diaries, for instance, reframes time through the archive. Drawing from personal footage of his own kindergarten graduation, Kashani examines repetition and memory not as nostalgic gestures, but as a meditation on the recursive nature of life transitions. The glitch aesthetics of degraded VHS tapes merge with the institutional objects that once defined BAK —now Basecamp—evoking (from a personal perspective) the Andean philosophical concept of Pacha (Quechua for both time and earth), where time is spatial and organic: a non-abstract, living being.

Pacha leads me seamlessly into the work of Mirella Moschella, whose installations Rooting Otherwise and We Are the Cerros That the Land Remembers explore space as a corporeal, communal, and ancestral terrain. In ​​this work, she explores deep connections between land, body, and memory through planting purple corn seeds from Peru in the Netherlands and creating textile installations dyed with natural pigments. Through materials and collaboration, the works honor Andean traditions, women’s wisdom, and the ongoing relationship between people and the land. Her work traces bodily displacement, diasporic memory, and layered forms of resilience—gestures that resist the dominant narratives of modernity, weaving together diverse communities and practices to foreground mestizaje, dissidence, and embodied survival.

In a related but distinct gesture, Wang Xue Sophia’s Please Dance Happily and Freely stages a confrontation between bodily agency and state-sanctioned control. This multimedia installation explores how female bodies are shaped by social systems through rhythmic movement. Centred on a traditional drum called the Dap, it connects cultural memories across Eurasia. The installation mixes dance, visuals, and sound to reveal control and freedom in movement. Workshops invite women from different backgrounds to unlearn and create new rhythms together. The work also poses urgent questions about autonomy, soil, and temporality—again echoing the dual meanings of ‘here/now’ and ‘there/then.’ If utopia can be glimpsed, Wang suggests, it is only through collective movement, freed from technicality and liberated from the oppressing order.

Similarly, Li Xiangdong’s Can I Receive a Letter from You? takes on the role of a ‘postman,’ presenting himself—disguised in the somewhat folkloric aesthetics of labour uniforms—while traveling through several European countries carrying ten letters received during his working process. It evokes the labouring body in transit—caught between sites of production and displacement. The work creates a working-class poetics of motion, revealing alternative perspectives embedded in the ‘meanwhile’ of migratory existence.

All of this unfolds within the broader uncertainty of artistic institutionality itself. From budget cuts within the academy to the volatile future of exhibition spaces. Meanwhile, like many graduation shows, does not necessarily offer finality—but insists on process(es). This is perhaps the most honest proposition artistic education can make: not to deliver solutions, but to open up ruptures. Fragility, in this context, becomes not a weakness but a potential. It is precisely through this fragility that new narratives—difficult, dissensual, and necessary—can emerge. In a time of growing censorship and polarization, art remains a precarious, and thus radical, profession.