Josephine Baan (also goes by the names Joseph, Jo, or any variation thereof) is an artist and educator based between Zurich and Rotterdam. Their 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.
They perform with their body and voice, and make 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.
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 since 2019 they co-run Zurich based School of Commons; a grassroots initiative dedicated to the study and development of decentered knowledge, with a focus on practices of peer learning and commoning. Their current research engages in developing a performance-based pedagogy which incorporates embodied learning, incoherence, and queerness as tools for collective worlding.
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:archive at 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).