Art & Education presents the new Classroom program “Watershed Ways,” curated by Clare Butcher, and New Artists gallery featuring work from Sandberg Instituut Amsterdam.
Watershed Ways
Curated by Clare Butcher
“Having grown up in small mining towns in Zimbabwe in the 1980s and ’90s, ‘drought’ was a word I learned early. Those who had flush toilets would place bricks in the cisterns to reduce the amount of water flushed away. Any water left over from washing bodies or cooking pots would be used to tend to withering plants outside. Decades later, in another home, in Cape Town, the city was about to run out of water. The countdown to an ominous ‘Day Zero’ served as a reliable but incalculable measure of the time between present water scarcity and future dehydration. Surrounded by unfathomable gallons of salty sea, the mountain reserves of fresh water on which the population depends had all but run dry. The desalination plants proposed by climate change activists and researchers years before Day Zero was forecasted still remain under construction. Those who had showers were restricted to two minutes of use per day. The military presence around remaining water sources increased. There was talk of draining the aquifers. Hydrological terminology I had never heard before crept into everyday discourse through public service campaigns, taxi rides, and stand-up comedy. For most, without running water at the best of times, Day Zero was just another municipal disappointment on an increasingly long list.
Water levels fluctuate while the pipeline of corruption between colonial infrastructures and the present-day reserving (reservoiring) of resources for a powerful few lies just beneath the surface. As Fred Moten and Stefano Harney write in The Undercommons, ‘Debt is mutual. Credit runs only one way.’ Water as a metaphor for both connection and division, I realize, can become dehydrated. But in days of elusive ‘dark pool’ trading and ‘waves’ of climate refugees, the reading of relationships in such fluid terminology invites further fantasy. The dictionary as manifesto. One in which lunar pulls and lapping tides become collaborative corrosive forces, wearing away the hard structures that seem unchangeable now.” [read more]
Featuring Koleka Putuma, the Mothers of Invention, Josephine Mandamin, Julie Cruikshank, CAConrad, the sound of ice, and rising waters.
Classroom features thematically organized lectures and conversations chosen by artists and thinkers on issues relevant to their practice and contemporary artistic discourse.
The Place of Birth: Sandberg Instituut Graduation 2019
From Adelaide to Zürich, the Sandberg Instituut Amsterdam proudly presents the publication The Place of Birth, which compiles the 2019 graduation exhibitions and events of the Sandberg Instituut. Ninety-one graduates of the Main Departments, Temporary, and Hosted Programmes presented their works to the public at various locations across Amsterdam, the Netherlands, June 14–16, 2019. Part draft and part final content, The Place of Birth consists of contributions by the graduates and guest writers.
The editorial series 9 Belly Buttons & 18 Cheeks includes texts by various guest writers and curators interpreting the works and occurring topics among graduated artists, designers, and (interior) architects. The Place of Birth includes editorials by writer Adrian Madlener, designer and performer Yuri Veerman, second-year student in Architectural Design at Gerrit Rietveld Academie Herman Hjorth Berge, journalist Thomas van Huut, writer and curator Sumaya Kassim, curator Jules van den Langenberg, urban and architectural geographer Mark Minkjan, critic Laurens Otto, and writer and researcher Tamar Shafrir. The Place of Birth is part of an ongoing series of publications by PS (Public Sandberg).
As the postgraduate programme of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, the Sandberg Instituut offers Master Programmes in Fine Arts, Interior Architecture, and Design. The five Main Departments aim to deepen the practices of artists, designers, and critics. In addition, the Temporary Programmes reflect on specific urgencies in society and the arts, and the Hosted Programmes focus on collaboration with other institutes. [view the exhibition]
New Artists offers schools a platform to present student work from degree shows, open-studio presentations, and other annual student exhibitions.