March 5th 2021 – Online event – 10.00am – 5.00pm 

The students of the Master Fine Art at the Piet Zwart Institute kindly invites you to have a peak at our online (Open)Studios event. Click the link and you will find a schedule of events, meet the current students and see what we have been up to. You are also welcome to visit and enjoy our garden at Karel Doormanhof to experience sprouting’s that spring and the students have made. 

At this (Open)Studios event, current students will share their multi-disciplinary practices on the airways with the annual Piet Zwart Radio station, they will be selling works on our online shop and sharing their writings on our online publication.  

There will also be opportunities to meet the MFA students for questions about the programme throughout the day. Keep an eye on our social media for updates and student Instagram take overs and the (Open)Studios event page for more details. 

Piet Zwart Institute MFA Karel Doormanhof  45 3012 GC Rotterdam The Netherlands 

www.pzwart.nl (Open)Studios Facebook / Instagram 

Participating artists:  Andrea Celeste La Forgia, María José Crespo, Oliver Doe, Grazia Gallo, Xiaofeini Liu, Kyra Nijskens, Emma van Noort, Afrang Nordlöf Malekian, Kate Price, Madeleine Ruggi, Shertise Solano, Samboleap Tol, Guillem S Arquer, Emma Astner, Linus Bonduelle, Dagmar Bosma, Pascale De Graaf, Aimilia Efthimiou, Halla Einarsdóttir, Diana Al Halabi, Junghun Kim, Bruno Machado Das Neves, Steven Maybury, Christian Aagaard Ovesen Pedagogical team 2020-21:Liesbeth Bik, Bernd Krauß, Luke Williams, Jan Verwoert, Nina Wakeford, Katarina Zdjelar, Federica Bueti, Natasha Soobramanien 

The annual Piet Zwart Institute Open Day will take place online on Saturday February 6th 2021. The full program per Master Program is now online on our website.

Photo: Anna Maria Łuczak, 2020.

Date: November 25th, 2020Time: 17.00hr / 5pmZoom: Join Zoom Meetinghttps://hogeschoolrotterdam.zoom.us/j/93146786963?pwd=bXhvSWMzQVlxeEZ2UGQydXNxRElQQT09Meeting ID: 931 4678 6963Passcode: 834371

The work of visual artist Yoeri Guépin emphasizes on research and often involves historical trajectories of knowledge production such as botany, archaeology, anthropology or the writing of history through objects. Central to the art- practice is working with collecting and the museum collection/archive as site of knowledge production and its historical vernacular to colonialism. Guépin’s projects often materialize in performative settings involving elements of film, text or objects, sometimes activated at a specific site. His latest project focusses on the late-colonial period and the role of the botanical garden in Bogor, Indonesia in the exploitation of its natural resources by the Dutch government. Guépin holds an MA from Dutch Art Institute (2013) and the works have been presented in various exhibitions and symposia such as Akademie Künste der Welt, Cologne (2018), TENT, Rotterdam (2019) and Times Museum, Guangzhou 2020. 

During the talk Guépin will combine both his gardening practice and his most recent project which focusses on botanical gardens, tropical agriculture and experimental plant sciences during the late colonial period in Indonesia.

Botanists at ’s Lands Plantentuin in Buitenzorg (Bogor) Indonesia with the first adult Oil Palm trees send from Hortus Amsterdam in 1848. (Image KITLV Leiden)

Date: Monday November 23rd.Time: 19.00hr/ 7pm Zoom: Join Zoom Meetinghttps://hogeschoolrotterdam.zoom.us/j/95016399542?pwd=V2hyM3hTczJiZTQ4ZTAvVjJYOWtFZz09Meeting ID: 950 1639 9542Passcode: 264416

A Leaky Offering: This talk will discuss the poetics, politics, and pleasures of the unfinished in my interdisciplinary practice. What does it mean to be a learner who creates work that is perpetually being iterated upon? In this talk, I will explore leakiness or the refusal of enclosure, as a liberatory technology that offers opportunities to wade in the porous boundaries between spiritualities, ways of knowing, and bodies of text. Kameelah Janan Rasheed (b. 1985) grapples with the poetics, politics, and pleasures of the unfinished: ecologies of Black living, Black textual production, Black utterances, and Black spiritualities. Rasheed is invested in the agile relationships between the varied modes of reading, writing, archiving, editing, translating, publishing, reflecting upon, and arranging narratives about lived Black experiences. These projects include sprawling, architecturally-scaled Xerox-based collages; large-scale text banner installations; publications; digital archives; lecture-performances; library interventions; and poems/poetic gestures. Rasheed has had national and international exhibitions and projects at the New Museum, NY; Transmissions Gallery, Glasgow, UK; Rice University, Houston, TX; Brooklyn Public Library, NY; Brooklyn Historical Society, NY; New Museum, NY; Bronx Museum, NY; Brooklyn Museum, NY; ICA-Philadelphia, PA; MassMOCA, MA, among others. Additionally, she has created public installations with Public Art Fund and For Freedoms / Times Square Arts. Her work has also been exhibited at the 2017 Venice Biennale, and will be included in the Glasgow International, UK (2021) and Prospect.5 (2021). She is the author of two artist books, An Alphabetical Accumulation of Approximate Observations (Endless Editions, 2019) and No New Theories (Printed Matter, 2019).

ARTIST TALK ALEXANDRA PHILLIPS

Date: Tuesday November 3rd, 7pm Join Zoom Meeting: https://hogeschoolrotterdam.zoom.us/j/91721863234?pwd=WnMrdHNGZDgxZ2hLQTQ4ZnVmdWdCQT09 Meeting ID: 917 2186 3234Passcode: 778395

This exploration into my work and practice will borrow concepts from the music recording world. Using the notion of the studio as instrument, I will refer to various experimental producers in pop music history (Joe Meek, Daphne Oram) to frame the unique type of knowledge an artist might glean from a focused studio practice. Attempting to understand the continuous practice of making as a tool in itself, we will touch on some ideas discussed in Hammer and Silence by Jyrki Siukonen. Realizing each of us is different in our way of making, I hope to offer some ideas that are not specific to medium or method, but more a discussion of the notion of a practice itself. Of course, there will be some surprises along the way.

Alexandra Phillips (b.1988) is American currently working in Rotterdam. Although she was born in New York State, she spent much of her formative years in North Carolina. Attending an art-centered high school program at University of North Carolina School of the Arts, she went on to complete a BFA in painting and a BA in art history at the Kansas City Art Institute. Her practice explores a range of medium from sculptural forms, to sound, to text and printed matter. Phillips has worked with various institutions in the United States and Europe, receiving a Van Lier Fellowship (2013), Atelier Mondial is supported by the Zaeslin-Bustany-Scholarship in collaboration with Christoph Merian Stiftung, Basel, Switzerland (2016), Jan van Eyck Academie (2017). For the past year her research has been supported by CBK Rotterdam. In 2011 Phillips and artist Jan Henderikse (b.1932) founded Purepropaganda.org Magazine, an absurdist design firm that continues to operate in various forms today.

It is this passion for materials—far more than the interest in what it is—that sets Phillips’ work apart from the narrative and anecdotal. Because Phillips is expressly not a creator of tableaux: “I’m not an image maker, illusion is not my thing.” She does reflect on the people who once felt desire for what now passes through her hands discarded—the wonder, sometimes with a dash of melancholy—but this never resurfaces in the work. Ultimately her art is meant to be concrete, to represent nothing other than what it is. Phillips works with the characteristics of her materials, but does not transform them. These are characteristics that are so often overlooked, precisely because they may contain a certain degree of randomness, as they are unintended characteristics. Hard cardboard becomes soft when it ages, colorfast plastic fades, and rigid polystyrene eventually crumbles. Alexandra Phillips gives precisely that neglected a second chance, she revisits the obsolete. Because everything deserves “a day in court,” as she likes to put it. The cards are reshuffled, it is a “new round, new opportunities,” for the functional and the functionless, for the unnoticed, worn and discarded, for that which has acquired a new meaning, value aesthetic with the passage of time.

– From Antoon Melissen, “A Day in Court” 2016

We are seeing the world being potentially transformed by the massive popular resistance to racism and anti-black violence that has been prompted by recent displays of racist brutality. The master’s courses of the Piet Zwart Institute stand in support of movements for racial justice around the world and we hold ourselves accountable to address the urgent demands being issued through protests and community-led actions. We recognize that to stand in solidarity with this movement is to commit to do the work of reflecting its aims of justice and equity within our educational and creative community. We must continue to support and empower diverse perspectives. We must deepen our commitment to making our resources more accessible to a local and an international student body. We must platform voices of resistance and amplify their work through our curricula and programming. And we will continue to engage in active and persistent dialogue and self-critique. We remain committed to manifesting the transformative change we hope to see in the world as educators, artists, and designers. Black Lives Matter.

In compliance with the Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences and to respond to the ongoing situation with the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), educational activities and offices of the Piet Zwart Institute are operating differently.

The deadline for applications for NONEU applicants has been extended until 31 March, 2020. The final EU deadline has been also extended to May 18, 2020.

Should you have questions concerning your application, *do not use pzwart-info@hr.nl*, please email directly the corresponding Course coordinator from the Master of your interest: Master of Fine Art and Master Interior Architecture: Research + Design, Zoraima Hupkes: z.hupkes@hr.nl Masters Experimental Publishing and Lens-Based Media Leslie Robbins: roblj@hr.nl Master Art in Education, Susana Pedrosa: demsm@hr.nl

Master Design. This course follows a different application process. Please follow this link for more information: https://www.wdka.nl/application-deadlines-master-design/

Important for application of the Master of Education in Arts. The portfolio should give a balanced overview of educational/pedagogical projects and experience, next to artistic/design work.

Date: March 9th, 2020 from 19:00 until 20:00

Location: Karel Doormanhof 45, 3012 GC Rotterdam

About the lecture:Christopher Meerdo will be lecturing on digital colonialism through his research-based photographic and emerging media projects Eigengrau (infrared facial recognition camera images mined from restricted international factory employee work registrations) and Channeling (a Generative Adversarial Network trained on the complete 70,000 image file archive of Osama bin Laden’s computer cache, released by the Central Intelligence Agency). The artist considers the working space of emerging technologies to question the power of non-human camera and data aggregations. 

Artist bio:

Christopher Meerdo is an artist who grew up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and spent his teenage years in Šiauliai, Lithuania. He resided in Chicago for the last 15 years before relocating in 2019 to the Dallas/Fort Worth area.Meerdo received his MFA in Photography from the University of Illinois at Chicago, taught at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 2012-2019, and was recently appointed tenure track Assistant Professor of Photography and New Media at the University of North Texas. Recent exhibitions include Exgirlfriend (Berlin); The Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago); Wilfried Lentz (Rotterdam), The National Gallery of Kosovo (Pristina), and The Mattress Factory Museum of Contemporary Art (Pittsburg). He was an artist in residence at the SIM Program in Reykjavik and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Meerdo was most recently a fellow at the Jan van Eyck Academie in the Netherlands for the 2018-2019 program. 

Image credits:

Channeling, 2019Modular LED display, Switcher/Scaler, Media Player, 8×8 ft (2.5×2.5m)Generative Adversarial Network trained on complete 70,000 image file archive of Osama bin Laden’s computer cache, released by the Central Intelligence Agency

Open Studios: Piet Zwart Institute Master of Fine Art

Karel Doormanhof 45 

3012 GC Rotterdam 

The Netherlands

February 8th 2020, 11am – 7pm 

What’s hidden in the garden? Where’s the exhibition? Whose hanging by the bar? Which things are on offer in the shop? When’s the radio on? How’s the menu? 

The Master Fine Art at the Piet Zwart Institute kindly invites you to come and have a nosy, meet some friendly faces and sample the wide array of culturally procured goods on offer at its annual open studios. Stop by during Art Rotterdam week and see what goes on in the MFA program’s building in Rotterdam city centre. 

Current students will open up their studios to the public and share their multi-disciplined practices that reflect the schools pedagogical approach. Exhibiting works and performances inside and outside the building, they will take you on a tour through gourmet cooking to green-thumbed gardening, pop-up bar design, radio disc jockeying and keeping shop. There will also be an opportunity to meet the core MFA teaching staff for questions about the programme and teaching methods. Keep an eye on our social media for a full program 

Prospective students, please feel welcome to join our guided tour from 2pm – 3pm

Participating artists: Emma Astner, Christine Ayo, Annabelle Binnerts, Linus Bonduelle, Dagmar Bosma, Antonia Brown, Jake Caleb, Pascale De Graaf, Aimilia Efthimiou, Halla Einarsdóttir, Guillem Arquer Gómez, Diana Al Halabi, Olga Hohmann, Peter Horneland, Jamie Kane, Junghun Kim, Bruno Machado Das Neves, Steven Maybury, Lucía Bayón Mendoza, Lukas Meßner, Christian Aagaard Ovesen, Josie Perry, Petter Dahlström Persson, Yanik Soland, Daphne Simons, Berglind Erna Tryggvadóttir 

And pedagogical team 2019-20: Liesbeth Bik, Kate Briggs, Bernd Krauß, Mike Sperlinger, Jan Verwoert, Nina Wakeford, Katarina Zdjelar.

View of PZI at Robert Smithson, Broken Circle/Spiral Hill, 1971. Photo: Jakob Forster. COURSE DIRECTOR – MASTER FINE ART (0,8 FTE) 

Willem de Kooning Academy, Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences (WdKA/RUAS), offers a variety of bachelor and master programmes in the field of visual culture, art, design, education in arts, and leisure management. All master courses are organized within the Piet Zwart Institute (PZI). 

About the Master of Arts in Fine Art and Design: Fine Art

The Master Fine Art at Piet Zwart Institute (PZI) is a two year English-taught Master of Arts in the Fine Art and Design programme.The programme fosters the professional development of emerging artists through exposure to key actors and influences in the field of contemporary art, professional guidance and workshops, and by offering opportunities for presenting ideas and work to wider audiences. Our collective ambition is to provide our students with a challenging, supportive and responsive learning environment, as well as a curriculum that offers the creative structure and committed resources they need to develop their individual and collective senses of artistic purpose and agency.

Position

The Course Director is responsible for advancing the research and teaching missions of the programme, and leading on curriculum and assessment development, faculty and student recruitment, and the management of organizational resources and structures with the needs of our international community in mind. We are looking for a resourceful and innovative international arts professional, who has imaginative visions for promoting excellence in artistic research and practice, in the context of arts education, but also in the professional field.Therefore he/she/they:· Maintains an inspiring teaching and learning environment for staff and students.· Leads the MFA with vision, and advances the research, teaching and professional missions of the MFA programme in alignment with broader institutional agendas at PZI and WdKA.· Works as a team with other Course Directors of the PZI and Major and Practice leaders at the WdKA.· Works with the WdKA research professors.· Participates in the development of artistic research.· Promotes the programme, students, faculty, alumni on national and international level.· Fosters relations with national, international and Rotterdam-based cultural and education organizations, including the Rotterdam Arts and Sciences Lab (RASL).Requirements

· A Master’s Degree or PhD in a relevant field.· A genuine enthusiasm for working with and mentoring contemporary artists.· A collegial attitude towards administrative and collaborative work across the PZI/WdKA.· EU/ECC work authorization.· Fluency in English, and a willingness to learn Dutch.· He/she/they is an excellent communicator who excels at sharing expertise and facilitating exchange within and outside of the MFA programme, in particular with the bachelor programmes of WdKA.· Prepared to move to the Netherlands.

Conditions

Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences offers a temporary contract, from September 1, 2020 to August 31, 2021, with the possibility for extension into a permanent contract. The salary ranges from €4,326.54 to €5,564.23 gross per month (salary scale 12) for a full time appointment, exclusive of additional 8% holiday pay and 8.3% end-of-year bonus. Secondary benefits include professional training opportunities and an attractive pension scheme.The tasks are divided between:

0.6 fte course leader, management and education0.2 fte research (to be discussed on hiring)

All staff members of Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences must be able to submit a Certificate of Conduct (Verklaring Omtrent Gedrag, VOG) issued by the Dutch Minister of Justice and Security.

Additional information

Informal enquiries about the position or the selection procedure can be directed to:wdka-PZIMFA@hr.nl.

Deadline for applications: March 1, 2020

Online applications through here

Please do not use this vacancy as an acquisition opportunity.