The Piet Zwart Institute will be open for new applications.

Due to the quantity of applications the Piet Zwart Institute Master programs receive, regulations regarding immigration, and international opportunities to apply for study funding, we strongly encourage you to apply early.

March 6, 2020: Priority deadline for completed applications of Dutch, EU applicants.Final deadline non-EU applicants.

April 24, 2020: Final deadline for completed applications of Dutch and EU applicants.

Open house: Saturday, February 1 2020, 10am–3pm.

The Master Fine Art organizes Open Studios on February 8, 11am–7pm.Only at Mauritsstraat 36/ Karel Doormanhof 45

The Piet Zwart Institute houses the international master programmes of the Willem de Kooning Academy at Hogeschool Rotterdam. Named after the pioneering Dutch designer Piet Zwart, who worked experimentally across different media and contexts, our institute offers a rich combination of in-depth specialisation and interdisciplinary exchange in an intimate learning environment.

The programmes of the Piet Zwart Institute are located in the heart of Rotterdam’s city centre. While students and faculty come from across the globe, bringing with them a variety of cultural influences, there are also strong connections to the city, its complex history and dynamic urban environment.

We have five master programmes: Fine Art, Interior Architecture: Research + Design, Experimental Publishing, Lens-Based Media, and Education in Arts. All are founded on a shared interest in the complex social, cultural and political underpinnings of each discipline. Through a uniquely tailored curriculum combining collective learning, intensive individual tutorial support, practice-based research and theoretical inquiry, our programmes educate young professionals who have a critically reflective and imaginative approach to their work.

As an educational institute the notion of “making public” is core to our activities. These public moments are an important resource for students, faculty members and guests, serving as a bridge to the city, a framework for exploring timely and relevant issues, and building a community around areas of interests. Exhibitions, symposia, conferences and publications expand our research beyond the confines of academia, while simultaneously valuing the very necessary speculative space for reflection and knowledge building that is only made possible through the rigorous academic framework of the Piet Zwart Institute.

Teaching staff:

Fine Art: Liesbeth Bik (artist), Kate Briggs (translator, writer), Bernd Krauß (artist), Mike Sperlinger (writer, curator), Jan Verwoert (theorist, critic), Nina Wakeford (artist, sociologist), Katarina Zdjelar (artist)

Experimental Publishing: Aymeric Mansoux (course director, artist, writer), Clara Balaguer (cultural worker, vernacular designer), André Castro (media artist), Michael Murtaugh (computer programmer), Steve Rushton (writer, artist), Natasha Soobramanien (writer), Marloes de Valk (artist, writer, curator), Amy Suo Wu (artist, designer)

Lens-Based Media: Simon Pummell (course director, animator & filmmaker), David Haines (artist, drawing, video), Ine Lamers (artist), Javier Lloret (artist, researcher), Barend Onneweer (independent visual effects, animation artist), Steve Rushton (writer, artist), Natasha Soobramanien (writer), Marloes de Valk (artist, writer, curator),

Interior Architecture: Research + Design: Alex Augusto Suárez (course director, architect, educator), Golnar Abbasi (artist, architect, researcher), Andrea Bagnato (editor, researcher), Cookies, Federico Martelli & Clément Périssé (architects, designers, researchers), Daphne Heemskerk (graphic designer), Ephraim Joris (architect, tutor), Natasha Marie Llorens (curator, writer), Studio Ossidiana, Alessandra Covini & Giovanni Bellotti (architects, designers, researchers), Olivier Otten (interaction designer).

Education in Arts: Ingrid Commandeur (course director), Kate Brehme (museum educator, public practices), Jolande Bosch (artist, educator), Emiel Copini (educator, secondary education), Elizabeth Graham (museum educator, curator), Prof. Dr. Frans-Willem Korsten (educator, researcher), Irina Shapiro (design educator, curator), Renee Turner (artist, educator), Sjoerd Westbroek (artist, educator), Thijs Witty (educator, research, writer).

Apply to the Piet Zwart Institute here.

Anthony Green

Date: Tuesday 10 December, 2019 from 19:00 till 20:30Location: Karel Doormanhof 45, 3012 GC Rotterdam

Mitigating Multiplicities: a study of a complex practiceAs politics, social environments, geographies, and climates continue to change, how do artists keep up – i.e. continue, remain relevant, but also avoid compromising?What does a complex practice look like in a world where the role of art seems to be losing value?In this talk, composer, performer, and social justice artist Anthony R. Green discusses these issues in the context of his interdisciplinary practice, focusing on how identity, history, current political trends, and absolute music and art can function synergetically. 

The practice of Anthony R. Green (composer, performer, social justice artist) is concerned with the metaphysics of the opressed, hyperbole and embodiment of injustice, and continuous questioning.His work has been presented at Tivoli Vredenburg (Utrecht), StadsSalon (Amsterdam), studio ilka theurich (Hannover), Cité de la musique et de la danse (Strasbourg), Symphony Space (New York), Spectrum (New York), LiteraturHaus (Copenhagen), The Shoe Factory (Nicosia), The Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (Omaha), the Charles River Esplanade (Boston), and others.His work has been interpreted by Gabriela Díaz, Wendy Richman, Ashleigh Gordon, Hayk Melikyan, NOISE-BRIDGE, ALEA III, the Fidelio Trio, the Playground Ensemble, BLY, counter)induction, the Keuris Sax Quartet, Ossia New Music Ensemble, and Alarm Will Sound, to name a few.As a performer (interpreter, performance artist) and scholar, he has performed and presented research for various conferences and festivals as an invited guest in the USA, the UK, Turkey, Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands.He is a former McKnight Visiting Composer fellow, a past resident artist at institutions in Europe and the US, and the composer-in-residence and associate artistic director of Castle of our Skins: celebrating Black Artistry through Music.  www.anthonyrgreen.com ; www.foundwork.art/artists/anthonyrgreen

VOLITIONAL VOLUTIONS OF THE VOLATILE WATERS BY MERVE KILIÇER

Date: Friday 6 December 2019 from 15:30 till 17:30Location: Karel Doormanhof 45, 3012 GC/ Mauritsstraat 36, 3012 CJ Rotterdam

This Friday, from 15.30-17.30 we invite you to the Open Studio of Merve Kılıçer, the first of our alumni to occupy a new research studio in Karel Doormanhof 45, Rotterdam.With this initiative we hope to consolidate and extend ongoing conversations across all the Masters of the Willem de Kooning Academie about the capacity of artistic research, while supporting the recent graduate.For the last four weeks Merve has been in residence at Karel Doormanhof 45, and on Friday we welcome you to explore her emerging work as part of the project Volitional Volutions of the Volatile Waters.Refreshments will be served.http://mervekilicer.com/about/http://mervekilicer.com/volitional-volutions-of-the-volatile-waters/

Navigating the Virtual, a workshop by Anja Kirschner Tuesday 5 November.

Anja Kirschner’s seminar will consider immersive technologies, such as Virtual Reality (VR) and other digital simulations (in gaming, training and design), not as ‘neutral’ technologies for modelling physical reality, but as technologies that have emerged from the military-entertainment-research complex and are actively shaping the physical world and modulating affects, behaviours and dispositions within it.

Drawing on Harun Farocki’s exploration of digital animation and Virtual Reality exposure therapy and the way these inform recent theoretical texts on navigating the virtual (by Tom Holert, Pasi Väliaho, Orit Halpern), we will explore the politics of virtuality, artificiality and survival (Claire Colebrook).

In particular, we will look at the rise of dominant navigational paradigms and at what the visual culture theorist Nicholas Mirzoeff has called decolonial countervisuality, or the right to look, which “refuses to allow authority to suture its interpretation of the sensible to power, first as law and then as the aesthetic.”

Anja Kirschner is an artist working in the moving image. Currently she is a PhD researcher at the Royal College of Art, London.

www.anjakirschner.com

Date and time: Tuesday 29th of October 2019, 7pm

Location: Karel Doormanhof 45, 3012 GC Rotterdam

Lisa Robertson is a poet and art writer. Born in Toronto, raised into writing by her feminist peers in Vancouver, resident now of rural France, her most recent publications are Proverbs of a She-Dandy (Belkin Gallery, 2018) and Thresholds: A Prosody of Citizenship (Bookworks, 2019)

The Baudelaire Fractal – This is the title of Lisa Robertson’s just-completed novel, which will be published by Coach House Books in January 2020. Robertson will read an excerpt from this story, in which a poet, Hazel Brown, of middle age and mild accomplishment, awakes one morning in a hotel room in Vancouver to discover that she has written the complete works of Baudelaire. Yet she never has been Baudelaire, not will she ever become him. The hotel room is the mysterious portal to this authorship, and so she meanders through the many hotel rooms of her life, considering fashion and sex in the 1980s, painting in the 1840s, perfume in the 1990s, the humiliation of domestic labour, and the good luck of having become a reader as an act of escape from both class and gender.

Date and time: Tuesday 15th of October 2019, 7pm Location: Karel Doormanhof 45, 3012 GC Rotterdam

Azar Mahmoudian is an independent curator and educator based in Tehran. Her recent projects include “When Legacies Become Debts” at The Mosaic Rooms, London (2019); multi-chaptered film program, “Sensible Grounds/Tectonics of Camaraderie”, for Tensta Konsthall, MAAT, SAVVY Contemporary, and Fundació Antoni Tàpies, among others (2018-2020); “Staging a change” and “Shifting Panoramas” at TMOCA, Tehran, and DAZ, Berlin (2018).

About the lecture: As sites of experimentation under less inhibited circumstances, self-organised and small-scale art institutions host projects that take different sorts of risks in face of the aesthetic ecologies of contemporary art world. Yet they hardly engage in creating a self-sustained and independent network, which can take care of its own models and values.  Instead, most of them often deploy the same methods or instruments of credibility that the mainstream art world follows, specifically in regard to the neoliberal agendas of visibility, inclusivity and myths of accessibility.

So these initiatives only complicate the shape of social, political, and economic strata of contemporary art world, while leaving its overall power relations, associated economies and prevailing value systems intact. This make those who work for these initiatives feel that their efforts have fed the mainstream at the end; a logic of “gentrification” that small-scale art institutions often lapse into.

Following some case studies, this lecture suggests fundamental considerations in regard to the slippery notion of the “public” of/for art, and potential of small scale and self-organized art spaces in adopting strategies of insulation, subversive invisibility, and inversion of private and public domain, for the benefit of “the communal”, and “interpretive communities”.

Curated by Mariabruna Fabrizi and Fosco Lucarelli, Inner Space opens next week at MNAC, National Museum of Contemporary Art. One of the five main exhibitions for the 5th edition of the Trienal de Arquitectura de Lisboa, The Poetics of Reason.

“Inner Space looks behind the curtains of the design process, questioning how the cognitive process of imagination unfolds and how it gets translated into a work of architecture, by identifying two parallel and strictly intertwined movements in the construction of imagination: a collective and an individual one.”

Amongst others, participating are 2019 MIARD alumni: Carlijn Olde Beverborg, Katryna Ciurlionis, Liza Diekema, Beatriz Peró, A Lim Kim, Ola Oszczak, Magdalena Wierzbickz. 

Visit the link for the full program.

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.

The academy prepares its students for core professions within the creative industries. The art education programmes play a key role in various knowledge domains including communication & technology, and art & social engagement.

These education programmes prepare students for a career in the cultural making industry: as artists, as designers, as makers and producers, as educators, as researchers, and as organisers.

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 at Willem de Kooning Academy/Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences.

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.

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. 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 organisations, including the Rotterdam Arts and Sciences Lab (RASL).

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.

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.

Conditions

Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences offers a temporary contract, from January 1, 2020 to December 31, 2020, 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 excellent professional training opportunities and an attractive pension scheme.

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: October 1, 2019

Online applications through here

Please do not use this vacancy as an acquisition opportunity.

The Piet Zwart Institute (PZI) houses the international Master programmes of the Willem de Kooning Academy at Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences. Named after the pioneering Dutch designer Piet Zwart, who worked experimentally across media and contexts, the PZI offers a combination of in-depth specialisation and interdisciplinary exchange within an intimate learning environment. The PZI Master programs are dedicated to promoting study and research in art, design, and art education, and share an interest in the complex social, cultural and political contexts of their respective fields.

During the period July 11-14 all the Master programs will be exhibiting a wide variety of work from students of Education in Arts, Experimental Publishing, Fine Art, Interior Architecture: Research + Design, and Lens-based Media.

This year Interior Architecture: Research + Design will exhibit work of graduating students on the fourth floor of the Willem de Kooning, Wijnhaven 61 building. More information here.

Master of Arts in Fine Art and Design: Lens-Based Media—will also exhibit work of graduating students on the fourth floor of the Willem de Kooning, Wijnhaven 61 building. More information here.

Master Education in Arts will be staging their symposium Pedagogy of Insist_ence on Saturday 13 July 11.00-18.00. at TENT, Witte de With street 50. More information here.

Master of Arts in Fine Art and Design: Experimental Publishing will be hosting their graduation festival—Upsetting Settings—on Friday 12 July 19:00-22:00 with workshops on Saturday 13 July 11:00-14:00 at WORM’s UBIK and SLASH GALLERY, Boomgaardsstraat 69, 3012 XA Rotterdam. More information here.

Master of Arts in Fine Art and Design: Fine Art will be staging the exhibition Midnight Sunburn contributing to Neuhaus at Het Nieuwe Instituut, Museumpark 25, Rotterdam. Performances in the building and its surroundings will take place throughout the four days of the exhibition. More information here.

The results of two years of Master level practice based research for a total of around 60 students. We invite you to come and share this celebration of the research and practice fostered at the Piet Zwart Institute.

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For details and opening times: https://www.wdka.nl/news-events/graduation-show-2019 PZI website: http://www.pzwart.nl/ Contact: pzwart-info@hr.nl