Saturday 9 October 20213–6 pm

Join us for a SESSION celebrating the poetics and circular temporality of harvest, on the occasion of Jasmine Thomas-Girvan’s solo exhibition Bathed in Sacred Fire, presented in collaboration with Sour Grass and the Piet Zwart Master of Fine Arts.

This special SESSION moves through a cycle of gathering, preparing, sharing, and enjoying the produce of a garden in dialogue with the celebration of an exhibition. Its title ‘Laying a Table for the Ancestors’ is inspired by the grounding from the artistic practice of Trinidad and Tobago artist Jasmine Thomas-Girvan, on the occasion of her first solo exhibition in Europe as part of Kunstinstituut Melly’s SOLO DUETS series. Often embedded in material traces of the Caribbean such as seed and gourds, palm fronds, and feathers, Thomas-Girvan’s sculpture embraces a botanical temporality of place in which ancestry can be embraced as futurity as well as past.

For this program, we will gather at our downstairs bookshop and café MELLY, before taking a short walk to the Piet Zwart Instituut where we will be welcomed by students and staff for an introduction to their collaborative garden. The planting and cultivation of the garden will be introduced, as well as the pedagogic principle of the garden as a place of collective learning among artists.

Following this, we will return to MELLY for a conversation program featuring honored guest, the author, and poet Olive Senior. Connecting virtually, Senior will share insights from her award-winning works such as the Gardening in the Tropics (1994, winner F. J. Bressani Literary Prize) which explores a Jamaican literary consciousness of political, natural, and spiritual worlds. Senior will engage in conversation with Thomas-Girvan, as well as with guest curators Annalle Davis and Holly Bynoe of Sour Grass, a curatorial agency dedicated to cultural practitioners of the Caribbean region.

SESSION: Laying a Table for the Ancestors – Experience – Kunstinstituut Melly

Position

The Master Fine Art is hiring a writing tutor for a position ranging from 0.2 FTE – 0.3 FTE.

We are looking for a practitioner-teacher with an established writing or research practice who desires to work within an international cohort of students, artists and colleagues. You will be teaching in collaboration with another writing tutor to advise year-2 students on writing their graduate theses. You will also be working with year-1 students to develop their understanding and approaches to research through the Proseminar: Research Practices curriculum.

We warmly welcome applicants from underrepresented, minority, or non-conforming communities. The staff at the Willem de Kooning Academy is diverse, not just in terms of practice profiles but also in terms of culture, gender, and ethnicity.

For more information please click here.

2020&2021 GRADUATION SHOW MFA PIET ZWART INSTITUTE Dates: July 1st – 11th, 2021Location: Het Archief, Robert Fruinstraat 52, Rotterdam, NLOpening: July 1st, 5:00 pm – 10:00 pmOnline performance & screening programme (TBA): July 10th

Opening hours:July 2, 3 and 4: 12.00 – 20.00July 5 and 6: open by appointment onlyJuly 7, 8 ,9 and 10: 12.00 – 19.00July 11: 12.00 – 18.00

The Piet Zwart Institute Master Fine Art celebrates the graduates of 2020 and 2021 with an exhibition of their recent works. 

Through lockdowns and uprisings over the last year, artists have had to question how to engage artistic practice and life within both turbulence and monotony. Art practices have had to renegotiate new awarenesses of health, safety, grief, and isolation. Meanwhile movements for social justice seeking recourse to historic injustices weigh on our everyday consciousness. Notwithstanding the current emergent contexts of our time, the artists in this exhibition have been tasked to also carry the particularities of their own aesthetic and relational concerns into a field that is rapidly transforming around them. Together, the 2020 and 2021 graduates of the Piet Zwart Institute Master Fine Art represent two ends of a very long year. The conditions that have marked us all in different ways continue to influence the many and varied directions taken by these makers, doers, and organizers. 

The location of this exhibition, the former Rotterdam city archives, provides an architectural framework and a space to project through layers of history. As a storehouse for data and documentation of a city through the span of several decades, the archive, now emptied of its contents, is an appropriate space for framing this collective endeavor. What materializations, documents, or remnants serve as useful indications of shared histories? How do singular images represent not only themselves but perhaps also stand in for communal narratives and even global paradigms? 

This exhibition is inclusive of Piet Zwart Master Fine Art graduates of both 2020 and 2021. Their  works, as singular as they may be, also stand as markers for an ongoing shared experience: not only of pandemic and social transformation, but also of the smaller movements of everyday life. There is a general sociality between these works as they came into being around each other. The mutual influence of the conditions of the Piet’s shared studio spaces, collaborations, and solidarities can also inform how we engage with this exhibition through curiosity, attention and care.

Participating artists:

Ayo, ‘20

Annabelle Binnerts, ‘20

Antonia Brown, ‘20

Jake Caleb, ‘20

Petter Dahlstrom Persson, ‘20

Olga Hohmann, ‘20

Peter Horneland, ‘20

Jamie Kane, “20

Lucia Mendoza, ‘20

Lukas Messner, ‘20

Josie Perry, ‘20

Daphne Simons, ‘20

Yanik Soland, ‘20

Berglind Erna Tryggvadóttir, ‘20

Guillem S. Arquer, ‘21

Emma Astner, ‘21

Linus Bonduelle, ‘21

Dagmar Bosma, ‘21

Pascale de Graaf, ‘21

Aimilia Efthimiou, ‘21

Halla Einarsdóttir, ‘21

Diana Al Halabi, ‘21

Junghun Kim, ‘21

Bruno Machado Das Neves, ‘21

Steven Maybury, ‘21

Christian Ovesen, ‘21

Organized by: Danny Giles (Course Director, Piet Zwart Institute Master Fine Art), Nathalie Hartjes (Director, MAMA), Kim de Haas (Daily Manager, MAMA)

About Het Archief:Het Archief is a creative breeding ground in the former archive of the Municipality of Rotterdam. In collaboration with SKAR Ateliers, the building is being developed into a place for artists, culture makers, exhibitions and more.

Date: Friday April 23rd, 7pmZoom link: Topic: Artist Talk Gordon HallTime: Apr 23, 2021 07:00 PM AmsterdamJoin Zoom Meetinghttps://hogeschoolrotterdam.zoom.us/j/98306883456

Please join us for this talk by Gordon Hall on their artistic practice and their current solo exhibition at Hesse Flatow Gallery in New York.Gordon Hall is an artist based in New York who makes sculptures andperformances. Hall has had solo presentations at the MIT List VisualArts Center, The Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, TheRenaissance Society, EMPAC, and Temple Contemporary, and has been ingroup exhibitions at The Whitney Museum of American Art, The BrooklynMuseum, The Hessel Museum, Art in General, White Columns, SocratesSculpture Park, among many other venues. Hall’s writing and interviewshave been published widely including in Art Journal, Artforum, Art inAmerica, and Bomb, as well as in Walker Art Center’s Artist Op-EdSeries, What About Power? Inquiries Into Contemporary Sculpture(published by SculptureCenter), Documents of Contemporary Art: Queer(published by Whitechapel and MIT Press,) and Theorizing VisualStudies (Routledge). OVER-BELIEFS, a volume of Hall’s collected essays, interviews,and performance scripts was published by Portland Institute forContemporary Art in 2019. Hall will be 2022 resident faculty at theSkowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

We are very happy to share that several of our students and alumni will be participating in the European Media and Art Festival this year. Christine Ayo, Jamie Kane, Linus Bonduelle, Dagmar Bosma, Shertise Solano, Antonia Brown and Afrang Malekian supported by Katarina Zdjelar will exhibit new video works alongside artists participating in other European academic programs. The video program can be viewed here: emaf.cinemalovers.de and you can find a full program of festival talks here: www.emaf.de.

‘Kate Briggs is a writer and translator whose brilliant first book This Little Art (2017) defies categorization. It is at once a memoir, a treatise, and a history, considering Briggs’s own life as a translator from French to English, offering an account of the nature and stakes of translation, and presenting a history of three women translators in the twentieth century. The book articulates and refracts the many strangenesses and paradoxes of translation as a practice and an art. Translation, Briggs shows us, is both lonely and collaborative, disciplined and profoundly educational, a private devotion and a public project. It energizes and frustrates, requiring from its practitioners passion, precision, and an openness to transformation. Briggs is the translator of two volumes of Roland Barthes’s lecture notes at the Collège de France, The Preparation for the Novel (2011) and How to Live Together: Novelistic Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces (2013), and co-translator of Michel Foucault’s Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology (2008). She teaches at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, Netherlands and is currently working on a new book: a novel-essay titled The Long Form.’

From: https://windhamcampbell.org/festival/2021/recipients/briggs-kate

Alemanen kanposantue, Iratxe Jaio and Klaas van Gorkum, 2020

Date: Friday March 19, 7pmZoom link: Topic: Artist Talk Piet Zwart InstituteTime: Mar 19, 2021 07:00 PM AmsterdamJoin Zoom Meetinghttps://hogeschoolrotterdam.zoom.us/j/92246640185T

Heritage can often be a source of conflict, as demonstrated by recent controversies over Dutch colonial legacies. Iratxe and Klaas will talk about the role this kind of conflict plays in their artistic practice. They will elaborate on some of the ideas developed by Iratxe in her recent essay The Porous Stone, in order to discuss notions of authenticity, identity, ownership and retribution in relation to contested heritage.Iratxe Jaio (Spain 1976) and Klaas van Gorkum (The Netherlands 1975) work as an artist duo since 2001. Their practice could be described as a kind of experimental archaeology. It explores the social significance of existing objects and documents, by appropriating and reproducing them within a different context. They have participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions at venues such as Artium Museum in Vitoria-Gasteiz; ADN Platform in Barcelona; FRAC-Aquitaine in Bordeaux; MUSAC in Léon; Tabakalera in Donostia-San Sebastian; Kunsthalle Exnergasse in Vienna; Fabra i Coats in Barcelona; De Appel in Amsterdam; or Konsthall C in Stockholm.

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)