Material Context
July 1–11, 2021
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
2020: Ayo, Annabelle Binnerts, Antonia Brown, Jake Caleb, Petter Dahlstrom Persson, Olga Hohmann, Peter Horneland, Jamie Kane, Lucia Mendoza, Lukas Messner, Josie Perry, Daphne Simons, Yanik Soland, Berglind Erna Tryggvadóttir
2021: 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 Ovesen
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.
