Vivian Sky Rehberg, the course director of the Master of Fine Art programme, has recently interviewed the artist Melvin Moti. This interview has been published under the title Yes, Wow, Totally, Pointful.

Melvin Moti is a Dutch visual artist who is currently receiving broad international appreciation for his subtle, multilayered, sometimes mysterious films, installations and books. In a long conversation with art critic Vivian Sky Rehberg, Moti illustrates his interests and concerns with insight and humour, focusing on several important works in his oeuvre. This exceptional conversation has resulted in a publication,  published by Metropolis M magazine. The publication will be distributed together with the latest issue of the Metropolis M magazine.

Saturday January 21, 2012 , 16:30 hrs.

Location: The Watermill Center
Address: 39 Watermill Towd Road | Water Mill, New York

It seems the hardest thing is realizing you are in charge

Performance by Catarina de Oliveira

Catarina de Oliveira and Camilla Wills will stage an open rehearsal of 2 performances made in conversation at Watermill. One at dusk, and the other in the darkness that follows. The artists reject the generally accepted system of ‘time’, instead believing each individual invents a personal and distinctive rhythm. Embracing their own relation to time, duration and history, they lift fragments from a diverse range of sources including Christopher Isherwood, epileptic characters, Suely Rolnik, and a grandmother, out of the frozen realm of reference and allow them the opportunity to work in a subtle, performative way. Implicit to the work is a negotiation of The Watermill Center itself, a dramatically staged live/work space literally overseen by Robert Wilson’s collection of artifacts, where domestic disorder and chaos are hidden out of sight.

Catarina de Oliveira’s practice incorporates: theatre plays; dance pieces; videos and audio plays, often being a tangent to these different mediums. Through the use of stylized imagery, restrained formal compositions and fragmented narratives, her artworks seek to investigate how different power structures operate and their manifestations through social and political rituals, along with inquiring how certain narratives or myths became part of a community’s history. She has been addressing such issues mostly by rendering the directorial input visible and by creating narratives that while existing in the symbolic and allegorical realms, escape dialectical or linear forms of engaging with time and history. Catarina is a Portuguese artist born in 1984 currently taking a Master of Fine Art at the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam. She was recently awarded the Huygens Scholarship by the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science and was selected by Serralves Foundation for the BESrevelação 2011 production grant and exhibition.

Understanding the grammar and layout of literature as an emotional field, Camilla Wills uses her preoccupation with the irrepressible affectivity of literary language to produce performances, installation, video and written work. The work posits the sensory properties of a phenomenological body perceiving the material world coupled with an errant, energetic subjectivity. A loose cadence of ideas materializes, and these associative patterns and chains of metaphors are embraced on the premise that they render experience legible, that recognizability converts into cognition. Camilla is a British artist born in 1985. She completed the Master of Fine Art at the Piet Zwart Institute in 2011, which concluded with an exhibition and catalogue in collaboration with the curator Ellen Blumenstein. She co-edits Dauerwelle, a journal for artists’ writing, found texts and extended editorial with Jacob Blandy.

Camilla Wills received funding from the Arts Council England for this residency.

Our Alumna Katarina Zdjelar will show her film ‘Rise Again‘ at the International Film Festival Rotterdam.

‘Rise Again’ focuses on a number of men, asylum seekers from Afghanistan. Discovering and inhabiting the wood proximate to the asylum center in which they live, they step outside of their prescribed roles as refugees and engage in voluntary (social) activities within this oasis, surrounded by highways at the edge of town. By combining allegorical imagery with martial arts elements, played and documentary scenes, the video develops a narrative structure in which these men appear in enfolding transformation. Moving between these registers, they resonate different roles and meanings, connect and articulate different historical and geographical scenarios, rather than embodying any in particular. Swinging between familiar media and cinematic imagery, bringing to mind soldiers, refugees, victims or adventurers on a group expedition the process of de/familiarization takes place. Except perhaps for ‘Bruce Lee’, being one of the Afghan refugees himself, whose likeness with the Hollywood hero is embraced (rather than staged) thus leaving the viewer wonder whether he is acting a role or pursuing his daily training routine. ‘Rise Again’ was commissioned by Frieze Foundation for Frieze Film 2011.

Other participating artists are: Yael Bartana, Eléonore de Montesquiou, and Jonas Staal.

The screenings will take place on:

• Saturday January 28, 2015 hrs at LantarenVenster, Rotterdam
• Sunday January 29, 12:30 hrs at LantarenVenster, Rotterdam

We are pleased to announce that Sobota, the film project of our alumna Anna Okrasko will be shown at the International Film Festival Rotterdam.

The film Sobota (Saturday) is a non-existent portable public monument, dedicated to the migrant workers in the Netherlands. The film is made up of a collection of contemporary black-and-white shots of Rotterdam, combined with a Polish documentary soundtrack from the 1950s.

The screening will take place on:

• Thursday February 02, 22:30 hrs at Cinerama 5
• Saturday February 04, 17:15 hrs at Lantaren Venster 3

Anna Okrasko (1981, Poland) graduated with a major in painting from the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts in 2004. She continued her studies at the multimedia department of the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow and at the Piet Zwart Institute.
She was recently awarded a scholarship by the Vordemberge-Gildewart Foundation and Stichting Promotieprijs in Rotterdam.

Saturday  December 10, 19:30 – 21:30 hrs

Location: Beukelsdijk 44A (Top Button) Rotterdam

Edmund’s Bedroom
A project initiated and organised by Master of Fine Art students Edmund Cook, Edward Clive, Jane Fawcett, Anouchka Oler and Kirsty Roberts.

Please join us this Saturday evening in Edmunds bedroom for a one night exhibition of things by Edmund Cook, Edward Clive, maybe Olivia Dunbar, Jane Fawcett, Anouchka Oler and Kirsty Roberts.

Edmund’s bed is slightly too large for the mattress, but you can just about fit a small person underneath it.
Someone said a flood lit house plant was the most comforting thing in the world, but we weren’t sure about that.
There’s quite a lot of dark, glossy, hardwood surfaces. Something with the lights. Snacks in ceramics.
Think teenage boy meets interior magazine stylist.

With the support of the Master of Fine Art programme at the Piet Zwart Institute, Willem de Kooning Academy Rotterdam University.

December 3 2011 , 20:00 hrs

Location: HMK (HotelMariaKapel)
Address: Kruisstraat 19, Hoorn, The Netherlands

Light Bar

Instant Coffee presents Light Bar, a full-spectrum light bar installation and venue for light therapy, light lectures, light shows, light reading and light rock. Instant Coffee Light Bar is an ongoing art project that investigates the potential and power of light.

On December 3rd, the Master Fine Art students Deniz Unal, Olivia Dunbar, Kirsty Roberts, Anouchka Oler, Fran Meana and Serena Lee will give informal presentations, performances and DJ sets.

Lecture Mark Terkessidis – open to all the Piet Zwart Institute students

Date: November 01 2011
Time: 10:00  – 11:30 hrs including Q&A
Location: Piet Zwart Institute – Large project room
Address: Karel Doormanhof 45, Rotterdam

Continental Europe never developed an original idea of cultural diversity. Diversity was introduced as a purely negative token, as rupture in the concept of the national. Diversity within societies was recognised either in terms of absence (post-holocaust) or as re-appearance (post-colonial).

But how can diversity be thought of as “post-migrational”? Cities have always been shaped by mobility and migration. So-called globalisation, however, has renewed and accelerated this process. Cities are no longer defined by dwelling but by movement. The city has hence become a vague entity, a “Parapolis”. What is the state of culture in the Parapolis? What is its position in space and time, its ethics and aesthetics, its legitimation and policies? Culture has become part of an urban environment that is defined a forced-upon, sometimes spooky historicity, coincidences and juxtapositions, arbitrariness of references and longing for new coherence.

For an ethics of culture in Parapolis, one may go back to founding texts of Western civilisation. In Homer’s Ulysses is typically seen as the bearer of the Western idea of individual freedom. But he is on a quest for home, which makes him a free human being and a citizen at the same time. The Ulysses of the “Ilias”, “at home” with his fellow Greeks and ready to expand their territory, is a brutal slaughterer. When he returns home at the end of the epic, he commits a massacre in order to be “at home” again and homogenise this territory. The quest for home therefore is the true state of civility.

In Parapolis, dwellers live a “Phililhellenism” of the kind described by Greek writer Mimika Cranaki during his emigration in Paris. The nation no longer works as a homeland, but is still there as an imaginary place. The search for home should therefore be no longer considered transitional, but the essence of civility. Culture has the potential of being the location for negotiating this search. Traditionally, aesthetics has close ties to the concept of emancipation – and its underbelly, the desire of nations and educated middle classes to set themselves apart from others. The aesthetics of culture in Parapolis needs to be more “conversational” and participatory along the lines of, for example, Grant H. Kester. In the aftermath of boding, there seems to be a need for more “banding”. It could therefore make sense to consider any utterance – whether art or not – culture, and focus on “atmospheres” rather than meaning. The culture of Parapolis is not just about diversity, but abundance.

On the basis of these considerations, this lecture will propose a programme of interculture, focusing on the individual with his/her diverse backgrounds and qualifications, and with the potential to open up a new space for negotiating community.

Mark Terkessidis is currently a guest researcher in the lectoraat Cultural Diversity within the research centre Creating 010 of the Rotterdam University.

From 1992 to 1994, he was an editor of the German pop culture magazine “Spex”. From 2003 to 2011 he worked as a host for the intercultural radio programme “Funkhaus Europa” of the West German public broadcasting service. Mark wrote numerous essays on youth and pop culture, migration and racism for German newspapers, magazines and public radio. Together with Tom Holert, he is the co-founder of the Cologne-based Institute for Studies in Visual Culture (isvc.org).

Our Alumnus Katarina Zdjelar will be showing new commissioned work during the Frieze Film 2011 at the Frieze Art Fair.

Frieze Film is a programme of artist commissions screened to coincide with Frieze Art Fair. Curated by Sarah McCrory, this year it includes five newly commissioned films that will be shown in the Frieze Art Fair auditorium and on Channel 4 television.

Frieze Film 2011
Dates: October 13 until October 16 2011
Preview: October 12 2011