Casco Art Institute

Casco was founded in 1990 in Utrecht, the Netherlands, as a platform for experimental art. Since 1996, Casco has developed a critical programme that explores art in the public realm, questioning the relation between art and its physical, social and political environment. Central to Casco's approach has been openness and flexibility towards programming, with projects taking multiple forms; be this in public space, a publication, a discussion, a workshop, exhibition, symposium or event. Since 1996 Casco has also sporadically published its own magazine, Casco Issues. In 2005 Casco took the new title of 'office for art, design and theory' in order to set a wider agenda towards an interdisciplinary practice that not only seeks to address these areas independently, but to venture into their cross-fertilizations, shared concepts, critical discourses, and their connections to other fields. Central to our investigation into these fields are the relationships between theory and practice. Casco maintains a questioning approach to culture, which is also applied to its own position in the cultural field. Besides pursuing different modes of artistic production, Casco seeks to open its own infrastructure up to experimentation in order to push the position of a visual arts organisation, both in the fields of art and design, and in wider social, cultural and political frameworks.