31 May 2018: Art-Knowledge #4 Arts & Education: New sites and concepts for radical pedagogies in the arts

31st of May, Art-Knowledge #4, Arts &Education: New sites and concepts for radical pedagogies in the arts, ARIAS & KNAW

What’s next in art and education? How are contemporary arts engaging in education, and how do practitioners from art and education respond to the issues of today? The final evening of the Art Knowledge series introduced three different proposals by artists, curators and designers that challenge traditional views of education by drawing on the rich tradition of radical artistic pedagogies. All three proposals explored how the arts and different forms of education impact the everyday lives of the inhabitants of Amsterdam.

The evening is kicked-off by Jurgen Bey, designer and director of Sandberg Instituut, who explored the City as a Campus and asked: how is education inscribed in the city of Amsterdam? How do new educational environments and large numbers of students effect Amsterdam as a knowledge based economy? Next, two curators introduced new educational approaches: Josien Pieterse discussed Ex-centric Public Cultures, reflecting on art and cultural practices that are rooted in social engagement and cultural agency, followed by Amal Alhaag who reported from her public research events Pedagogies of the Opaque, showing the results of collective learning practices in Amsterdam shaped by inter-generational, ex-centric, minoritized, racialized and radical approaches. Artist Jorge Lucero presented his vision on the teacher as a conceptual artist. In his art practice the school functions as a studio, the everyday reality of teaching as ‘material’, and the pupils as artistic co-creators. Last contribution is by urban sociologist René Boer, who introduced the new site-specific campus developed at Amsterdam’s Zeeburgereiland, making it a testing ground for new ways of living, making, sharing, managing and maintaining, i.e. new form of ‘commoning’.

This last ARIAS/KNAW event of this series ended with closing thoughts and questions to the audience by Jurgen Bey: what did this evening offer in terms of concrete proposals for the near future? How can artists, art educators and researchers start research projects together, how can institutes and schools of all educational levels and orientations be involved?

Jurgen Bey is designer and director of the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam as well as board member of Gerrit Rietveld Academie. Bey graduated from the Design Academy in Eindhoven and also taught there from 1998 until 2004. He has designed products, furniture, interiors and public spaces. With his studio Makkink & Bey he has won multiple prizes, including the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds Award in 2005.

Marijke Hoogenboom is lector at the Academy for Theatre and Dance. She is the head of DAS Research and the chair of DAS Graduate School. At the Amsterdam University of the Arts she directs the AIR Artist in Residence programme. Hoogenboom was previously one of the founders of DasArts, the first institute in the Netherlands for graduate education in the performing arts. Recently she received the Comenius Senior Fellowship for leaders in education (NRO).

Jorge Lucero is an artist, currently affiliated with the School of Art + Design at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Lucero was educated at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and obtained a PhD degree from Pennsylvania State University. He is known as a conceptual artist and prominent art teacher and is also active as an author for various journals in the field of art education. In 2018, Lucero is Artist in Residence (AIR) at the Arts Education research group at the Amsterdam University of the Arts, sharing and developing his radical vision of the (art) educational practice with students from the four teacher study programmes at the AHK.

Josien Pieterse is co-founder and director of Network Democracy and Framer Framed a platform for contemporary art, visual culture, and critical theory & practice. Since 2007 Josien works as oral historian and researcher at Atria, knowledge institute for emancipation and women’s history. Josien publishes regularly on her research.

Amal Alhaag is an Amsterdam based independent curator, cultural programmer and radio host with an interest in counter-culture, oral histories and global social issues. Together with artist Maria Guggenbichler, Alhaag cofounded the Side Room, a discursive platform for art & intersectional theory in Amsterdam. In addition, she is currently the artistic director of contemporary urban culture platform Metro54 and curator public programming at Framer Framed; a global art platform for critical reflection in Amsterdam.

René Boer works on the intersection of architecture, urbanism, heritage and art, is part of the Non-fiction collective and managing-editor at the research studio Failed Architecture. He was among other critic-in-residence at the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam and guest curator of the Misericordia art project at the Oude Kerk in Amsterdam. The research project ‘Architecture of Appropriation’, which he developed in collaboration with Het Nieuwe Instituut has been shown in exhibitions in Rotterdam and São Paulo.

Four evenings on Art-Knowledge by ARIAS & KNAW

What can the sciences learn from the arts (visual and performing arts, literature, architecture, music etc.)? And what can the arts learn from academia? The KNAW (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts & Sciences), the Akademie van Kunsten and ARIAS offered a series of four evening events at which artists and researchers showed, performed and lectured on the way art research operates on the interface of art and academia – from new ways of writing to new concepts of wellbeing, experimental forms of researching ecological questions, and experiments in education.

Thursday 22 February: Writing Worlds (Perdu)
Thursday 29 March: Arts & Health (OBA)
Thursday 19 April: Arts & Ecologies (Perdu)
Thursday 31 May: Arts & Education (Perdu)

ARIAS is a research platform by the Amsterdam University of the Arts (AHK), Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (HvA), University of Amsterdam (UvA) and Vrije Universiteit (VU). ARIAS enables intersections, encounters and collaborations between artistic research and research in the humanities, social sciences and the natural sciences.