Nothing could be slow enough, nothing last too long brings together works by eight artists from different geographical locations and artistic contexts, who for two years, and on a daily basis, shared their studios, thoughts and practices in the Master of Fine Art programme at the Piet Zwart Institute. The title, borrowed from a line in Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs Dalloway, refers at once to the strange temporality of an artistic education and to our renewed preoccupation with time in relation to art and life. What Virginia Woolf alludes to in her lines are the discrepancies involved in the experience and perception of time. Lived time and interior time are often at odds with the linear topography of temporality as represented in calendars, clocks and stock- exchanged time. A memory of an event, for example, can have a longer or shorter time span for a specific person than officially recorded. While the everyday and the present escape relentlessly, transformations occurring in time are felt and perceived in a more durational geography of the body and the self. The personal perception of temporal relations between things and events often makes us question and reconsider not only our life time, but also the broader framework of art, politics, technology, society and history. What is charged with future and intersecting the past becomes a kind of landscape that propels into the materiality of things. If the shared temporal framework of an MFA program loosely binds the diverse range of works produced by these artists for their graduate exhibition, a concern with how personal temporality and subjectivity intersects with historical events and transformations is also evident in them. The works operate within what always mystically escapes and often seems illogical. Often they echo a sense of absurdity and playfulness. However, this is not a symptom of detachment, but rather of a desire to reposition the self (or the personal and the body) within the temporality of the world. The works here posit an uncanny opening in the skin of time, while firmly operating within the contemporary.
Jasper Griepink won the Piet Zwart Institute Fine Arts Jury Promotieprijs.
News from Nowhere – Master Media Design and Communication
Text: Simon Pummell, Curated by Willie Stehouwer
News from Nowhere: the title of the show is taken from the classic novel written by the artist, designer and socialist pioneer William Morris. In this novel, that that loops together utopian socialism & science fiction, the main character falls asleep after returning from a meeting of the Socialist League and awakes to find himself in a future society based on common ownership and an open and democratic control over society’s means of production. By yoking together two disparate languages (political discourse and genre fiction) William Morris tried to create an image of a utopia. These themes and strategies resonate with much of the research undertaken by the artists in the show: both in form and content. These works severally explore the politics of decision-making, our political relationship to the images and information that surrounds us, and our subjective relationship to our own histories. The works also loop together languages taken from a range of discourse including pop culture, political theory, spam email, feminist debates around consent, family scrapbooks and archives. It is this looping together of disparate forms and codes that forms a common pre-occupation of the research undertaken within the department. Within contemporary media, code and image have interpenetrated. From digital cinema, to database driven gallery installations, and web publishing: contemporary media objects are constituted by mutually embedded code and image, the two are impossible to tear apart. In a parallel development, media objects inevitably form the dominant crucible in our culture where disparate codes derived from critical culture, commercial culture and technology are forced together. Our newly expanded department focusses on research into the forms that are developing through these complex interpenetrations, and the artists in this show epitomise the exciting research being undertaken within this new area.