We are now accepting applications for the 2013–15 academic term and will review them on a rolling basis until all positions are filled.
Focusing on visual arts, but explicitly granting attention to the crossings and interactions with other disciplines and knowledges, DAI (Master of Fine Art at the ArtEZ Faculty of Art and Design), provides emerging artists with a two-year English taught program that enables them to deepen their exploration of theoretical, conceptual, curatorial and productional aspects of art, both at the forefront and at the fringes of contemporary practice. DAI aims to promote new perspectives on collaboration and exchange, production and distribution, ethics and aesthetics and brings together practitioners from all over the world, a fleeting community committed to beauty, truth and resistance through art and critical theory.
DAI’s unique features:
Monthly, one week-long residential programs
Rather than requiring its students to be present on a daily basis, the DAI offers an alternative educational environment: students, faculty and guest tutors take part in monthly, one week-long residential programs that last from early morning until late at night. The so-called DAI-week is structured by a dense weaving of seminars, reading groups, publishing classes, lectures, performances, presentations and face-to-face conversations. This highly concentrated time functions as a pressure cooker for a collective exchange of knowledge that accumulates throughout the year, with every month’s gathering. Students are expected to continue developing their independent research while engaging with the DAI’s discursive input, workshops and support structure.
During DAI-weeks, everybody involved is accommodated in Arnhem. In-house lunches and dinners with students, faculty and guests are important shared moments that mark the communal aspirations of the program.
DAI and its associates constitute an ‘interface’ between academy and professional field:
Commissioned and hosted by the DAI, longtime partners If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution (Amsterdam), the Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven) and Casco, Office for Art, Theory and Design (Utrecht), curate and tutor one- or two-year projects that are vital to the DAI’s curriculum. These art institutions each have their own perspective and scale, and accordingly offer a variety of projects that ground and locate artistic practice within the institutional field, directly involving students in their current programs and stimulating thinking as well as doing.
–How to Live Together, Publishing Class III (a collaboration between the DAI, Casco and Werkplaats Typografie) traverses the realms of art and life and locates artistic writing or non-writing at the heart of art publishing.
–The Van Abbemuseum’s course Useful Art at the DAI seeks to recalibrate art’s ‘use’ or ‘use-value’ to society. The group will exhibit research outcomes in the museum.
–Occupation Evacuation Transmission, a project curated by If I Can’t Dance I Don’t Want to Be Part Of Your Revolution assumes the model of a research group, which, through a performance-based mode of enquiry, questions the nature of performance itself.
DAI is a ‘roaming academy’
Reinforcing its structure of monthly meetings in Arnhem, DAI as Roaming Academy offers an itinerant program that combines courses in the Netherlands with travel abroad. The DAI’s location in Arnhem, more or less under the lee of the art world, works to strengthen its susceptibility to the complexities inherent to the realities of other peripheries.
Since 2004 collaborations with various institutions and individuals worldwide have brought students and faculty to, amongst others, Beirut, Taipei, Damascus, Teheran, Bangalore, Diyarbakir, Yerevan, Khartoum and Dakar. This month DAI-students, together with Renée Ridgway, will be at work in NYC, investigating contemporary arts existent financial models along with its present and future predicament in a post-Fordist society.
DAI’s regular and irregular tutors are all vigorous and committed artists and / or theorists:
Frederique Bergholtz, Rossella Biscotti, Brett Bloom, Tony Chakar, Binna Choi, Mladen Dolar, Charles Esche, Mark Fisher, Natasha Ginwala, Rana Hamadeh, Emma Hedditch, Doreen Mende, Wendelien van Oldenborgh, the Otolith Group, Emily Roysdon, Adrian Rifkin, Jimmy Robert, Adania Shibli, Nishant Shah, Grant Watson, Ian White and Stephen Wright, to pick just a few from our list. The program is headed by Gabriëlle Schleijpen.