Tell me why? That way? — When spirits pass the doors to language and say “we want“
Time March 11th & 12th 2024
Location MFA studio building at Kareldoormanhof 45, 3012 CW Rotterdam
In this series of talks, Jan Verwoert addresses dominant protocols surrounding the recognition of authorship in the arts, and searches for alternatives in daily practice and ancient comedy. In this talk, he will turn to demonological accounts of how spirits enter into dialogue with the living via art and politics; dwell on psychoanalytical notions of what happens when desires pass over into language, and we fail to authorize them; and end by asking: how is it that, since antiquity, people find it funny to see comedians open the door, when the Unknown comes knocking.
The lecture on 13 December at 20:00, will be followed by a workshop session on 14 December at 11:00. During the workshop, the ideas presented in the talk, as well as excerpts from the manuscript of a forthcoming book, will be discussed in greater depth through communal peer-review discussions.
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Artist Talk by Yin Yin Wong
Time March 11th & 12th 2024
Location MFA studio building at Kareldoormanhof 45, 3012 CW Rotterdam
The Piet Zwart Institute Master Fine Art is thrilled to welcome artist Yin Yin Wong as guest tutor this March! In partnership with the Willem de Kooning Academy Research Center, we hosted Yin Yin for a special workshop open to MFA students and a public artist talk.
Yin Yin gave a public artist talk open to the public, no registration required.
Time: Monday, March 11th, 16:00
Location: ground floor project space, MFA studio building at Kareldoormanhof 45, 3012 CW Rotterdam
Workshop: Comic Relief
Time: March 12th, 10:00 – 16:00
Location: ground floor project space, MFA studio building at Kareldoormanhof 45, 3012 CW Rotterdam
Through playful exercises, Yin Yin Wong hosted a workshop aimed at bridging various social and cultural thresholds through the use of humor and storytelling. Taking inspiration from stand up comedy, comic books and memes amongst other things, this workshop-series investigates the political potency of humor in a time of enduring grief and increasing polarization.
Yin Yin Wong is a multidisciplinary artist working across a range of media including film, sculpture, drawing and site-specific installation. Previously as Publication Studio Rotterdam (2015–2021) they worked largely around themes of distribution, dissemination and circulation of visual culture through publishing artist books and curating exhibitions departing from text. Currently they are researching possible bridges and juxtapositions between their modernist graphic design education and their childhood growing up in a Malaysian-Chinese restaurant in the Netherlands. By focusing on themself as a site where different legacies and languages converge and complicate each other, Wong looks for overlaps that speak cross-culturally. Through an auto-ethnographic lens they question the dominant frameworks that permeate nearly every aspect of their life.
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Piet Zwart MFA at Venice 2022
Time April 26, 2022
Location 59th Venice Biennale
The Piet Zwart Institute Master Fine Art is pleased to announce our participation in “Personal Structures”, an exhibition organized by the European Cultural Centre Italy coinciding with the 59th Venice Biennale. The works of current PZI MFA students will be on display at Palazzo Mora April 23rd until November 27th 2022. The MFA presents an exhibition within an exhibition curated by our friends Shimmer.
This exhibition, I Must Be Living Twice, proposes an unfixed quality of artistic production, returning to the studio as a space of powerful inarticulation. We invite the method of the studio into the exhibition to resist the environmental impacts, demands of production pressure, and typecasting that often accompany exhibitions. We attend to the private, tender points in which decisions are made in an artwork. This is where artwork splits off, continues, changes, rejects, or is forgotten.
This collection of work is amassed from the off-cuts or the not-yet-decided of material processes. These are the trimmings, the unworked ideas, the might-have-been that ends up sidelined. These materials have yet to find a footing in an artwork. These could also be the ‘objects’ of influence of painting or your practice over time. Perhaps it is a mirror on the desk, the rocks you keep picking up, or the ever-growing folder of dolphin tattoos.
I Must Be Living Twice features the trimmings, edges, and studio fragments of artists currently enrolled in the Piet Zwart Institute Master Fine Art in Rotterdam and is curated by Eloise Sweetman and Jason Hendrik Hansma, co-directors of Shimmer art space.
For more information visit https://personalstructures.com/
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SESSION: Laying a Table for the Ancestors
Time Saturday 9 October 2021
Location Kunstinstituut Melly
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 gathered at our downstairs bookshop and café MELLY, before taking a short walk to the Piet Zwart Instituut where we were 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 returned 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 engaged 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
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BODY EAT WORLD GET TRANSMITTER
Time Tuesday 23rd of September, 7 pm
Location Piet Zwart Institute, Karel Doormanhof 45 3012 GC Rotterdam
On the specifics of corporeal mediumship
The gift and curse to channel the history of the clan via the body of the self, and share, with whoemever is within reach, the pain and joy of that which never stops arriving in the guise of new emotional throws and spasms of the imagination: manic depression, hysteria, spiritual mediumship, witchcraft, carnival and obscene language are channels through which the deep knowledge of what, where, when, why and how the hell/fuck was/is happening is being transmitted. A history of power and its patriarchal repression, and an ongoing story of unsettling potentials.
Jan Verwoert is a critic and writer on contemporary art and cultural theory, who has been a core tutor on the fine art program at the Piet Zwart Institute since 2005, He is author of ‘COOKIE!’, a collection of texts edited by Vivian Sky Rehberg and Marnie Slater for the Piet Zwart Institute/Sternberg Press publication collaboration, which follows on his first collection of texts ‘Tell me what you want, what you really really want’, edited by Vanessa Ohlraun.
Jan is also a contributing editor of Frieze magazine and his writing has appeared in different journals, anthologies and monographs. He is the author of ‘Bas Jan Ader: In Search of the Miraculous’, (MIT Press/Afterall Books 2006) and, together with Michael Stevenson, ‘Animal Spirits—Fables in the Parlance of Our Time’ (Christoph Keller Editions, JRP, Zurich 2013).
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MFA GRADUATION SHOW: KAIROS TIME
Opening Friday July 11th, 8pm
Exhibition July 12 until August 17
Location TENT, Witte de WIthstraat 50 3012 BR Rotterdam
Featuring: Liz Allan, Maarten Bel, Sabrina Chou, Philip Ewe, Christian Hansen, Ann Maria Healy, Roos Wijma, Hannah James, Graham Kelly, Perri MacKenzie, Machteld Rullens, and Micha Zweifel.
Curated by Matteo Lucchetti
Kairos Time features twelve international artists based in Rotterdam whose works deploy a multiplicity of poetics and reflect diverse approaches to artistic practice today. The title refers to a possible common ground between the artists and the works, which may or may not be located in the spatio-temporal, social and political contexts from which they have emerged. Along with Kronos, Kairos is an ancient Greek word for time, but while the former refers to chronological, sequential time, the latter alludes to the right or opportune moment when action must be taken, chances seized or conversely lost, inevitably affecting the course of things. Kairos represents a time lapse, an indeterminate moment when anything can happen and opportunities can be grasped, if and when they are perceived at all. Kairos Time is here understood as a space of potential, found in the daily situations or circumstances that an artist must assess and work with or against.
If we view an art practice as a series of seized favorable moments, it is worth asking: how much opportunism does it take to be an artist today? In A Grammar of the Multitude (2004), the Italian philosopher Paolo Virno analyzes post-Fordist conditions of labor and describes opportunists as “those who confront a flow of ever-interchangeable possibilities, making themselves available to the greater number of these, yielding to the nearest one, and then quickly swerving from one to another.” By depriving the term of its negative connotation Virno invents an extremely up to date rhetoric around the contemporary worker, which recalls the traits of openness, flexibility, and the unbiased attitude that are often associated with the figure of the artist.
Ranging from video to installation the works in Kairos time reflect the artist’s specific capacities to transform circumstances into meaningful visual systems, to turn specific material limits and restrictions into open-ended speculative journeys, and suggest that the opportune moment is a condition of the mind rather than a logically determined and immediately graspable point in time.
In collaboration with the Master of Fine Art Program of the Piet Zwart Institute, the post-graduate studies & research institute of the Willem de Kooning Academy.
Events
Screening Thursday July 10, 8pm
The Fertile Nexus is a presentation of video works selected by Graham Kelly in dialogue with his work in the exhibition, Kairos Time, at Tent in Rotterdam. The screening will investigate the mutation of a now fluid moving image, following its migration from a controlled cinema context to its embedment within the external environment. It sets out to question the hybridisation of both the viewer and the image in their newly shared habitat: a transitional state from which one can look into the other and the other back into one.
WORM
Boomgaardsstraat 71
3012 XA Rotterdam
The Netherlands
Weekly
Events in Café Bel by Maarten Bel
Check TENT website: www.tentrotterdam.nl
for more info http://kairostimes.tumblr.com/
For more info check:
http://pzwart.wdka.nl/nl/courses/mfa/
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GEOFFREY FARMER: THE GRASS AND THE BANANAGO FOR A WALK
PIET ZWART INSTITUTE – MASTER OF FINE ART PRESENTS
Geoffrey Farmer: The Grass and the Bananago for a walk.
Date Monday March 3rd, 2014
Time 19.00 hr
Location Piet Zwart Institute, Karel Doormanhof 45 Rotterdam
In MATERIALITIES, a lecture series organized by the artists enrolled in the Master of Fine Art program at the Piet Zwart Institute.
We are delighted to present Geoffrey Farmer’s lecture The Grass and the Bananago for a walk.
From Geoffrey Farmer:
“The banana arrives by boat. It rings like a phone and slips us up if we are not careful. The grass appears everywhere. It materializes the wind, grinds in the mill and enters into the gut of the Ungulates. The banana laughs, the grass coughs. The banana is a poet and the grass is a photographer. For my talk at Piet Zwart, I will meander through the material methodology of my knowledge. From learning to spell as a child by using bread dough, to growing perennial grasses and cutting out 17,000 images from LIFE magazine to make a work.”
Geoffrey Farmer (b. 1967, Vancouver, lives and works in Vancouver). At once fragile and multiform, discreet and omnipresent, Farmer’s work is the product of simple yet strategic manipulations. It operates on the same level as everyday experience: simultaneously rational and chaotic, undeniably concrete yet shaped by the imagination. In a voice that combines poetry and social commentary, his work conjures and reactivates a variety of narratives drawn from history, popular culture, art history and social environments. It also reflects an interest in the exhibition itself – both its fictional power and its temporal component. Farmer focuses on particular features of these diverse sources, notably concepts of the work and process, transformation and performance.
Geoffrey Farmer has a forthcoming retrospective at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2015 and his major installation Let’s Make the Water Turn Black was shown at the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich and Nottingham Contemporary in 2013, opened at the Hamburg Kunstverein on March 1, and will travel to the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto and the Pérez Art Museum Miami in 2014.
Recent solo exhibitions include The Grass and Banana Go for a Walk, Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver (2014); a new solo project for the fourth installment of Hybrid Naples (with Bettina Allamoda), Fondazione Morra Greco, Naples; A Light in the Moon, Mercer Union, Toronto(2013); The Surgeon and the Photographer, The Curve, Barbican Centre, London (2013); Mondegreen (with Jeremy Millar), Project Arts Centre, Dublin (2011); Casey Kaplan, New York (2011); REDCAT, Los Angeles (2011); Walter Philips Gallery, Banff (2010); Museo Experimental El Eco, Mexico City (2010); Witte de With, Rotterdam (2008). Recent group exhibitions includes The Intellection of Lady Spider House, Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton (2013); Triennale der Kleinplastik, Stadt Fellbach (2013); dOCUMENTA (13) (2012); Stage Presence, SFMOMA, San Francisco (2012); Tools for Conviviality, Power Plant, Toronto The Garden of Forking Paths, Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich (2011); Istanbul Biennial (2011). In 2013 Farmer was awarded the Gershon Iskowitz Prize.
Future speakers include: Mark Leckey, and more…
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EVENT: JOSHUA SIMON’S NEOMATERIALISM
PIET ZWART INSTITUTE – MASTER OF FINE ART PRESENTS:
Joshua Simon’s Neomaterialism: The Unreadymade and the Dividual
Time 19.00 hr
Date Wednesday January 22nd, 2014
Location Piet Zwart Institute Master Fine Art
Address Karel Doormanhof 45, Rotterdam
In MATERIALITIES, a lecture series organized by the artists enrolled in the Master of Fine Art program at the Piet Zwart Institute
As an art institute fueled by our research and practice, we have collectively found ourselves considering, on a daily basis, how research is materialized and how, in turn, the material realm drives research. Theoretical, contextual, and material concerns are equally expressed in our work and we have identified a number of materialities that have crystallized out of negotiations between them. These materialities include material as methodology, research material, the material of language, the ruins of material, the material experiential, and theory of the material. The emergence of these multiple threads in our own research and practice has consequently led us to query this seemingly material moment. This series of public conversations opens up a dialogue around the material, investigates such materialities, and explores why materiality matters, now.
We are delighted to launch this series with Joshua Simon’s lecture Neomaterialism: The Unreadymade and the Dividual:
Following up on ideas presented in his book Neomaterialism (Sternberg Press, 2013), Joshua Simon will engage with notions of the commodity, the general intellect, debt, labor, subjectivity, thingness, the dialect of material and dialectical materialism. With labor moving from production to consumption, the meaning of it shifts from alienation to debt, and things, actual things, change. With an overqualified generation subjected