Ac/kademie 4

Ac/kademie #4: Art as Social Practice focusses on recent projects by Rijksakademie residents and alumni that came about in collaboration with the Rijksakademie workshop for social practice. The workshop encourages collaborative practice and enables artists to build stronger connections and dialogue in the Rijksakademie’s local context, Amsterdam East, and beyond.

Artists are increasingly working outside the framework of the established art world, and searching for a meaningful role within a social context. They work with individuals or groups on projects where the end result is not necessarily physical work, but a critical intervention, a debate or a social exchange.

The programme will be opened by Elke Uitentuis, workshop specialist Social Practice (Rijksakademie) with an introduction into the Social Practice workshop. Afterwards, Homing (Charlaine Reval & Laura O'Neill), Ratu R. Saraswati, Bert Scholten, Aimée Zito Lema and Elisa van Joolen present their recent projects developed in conjunction with the Social Practice workshop, some of which were realised in collaboration with art space Framer Framed. This will be followed by a panel conversation moderated by Elke Uitentuis.

Ac/kademie is a series of artist-lead conversations amongst the residents of the Jan van Eyck Academie and the Rijksakademie, two post-academies in the Netherlands. This series is organised in collaboration with the Saastamoinen Foundation and the Academy of Fine Arts, Uniarts, Finland.

The Jan van Eyck Academie and the Rijksakademie alternate monthly in hosting a public dialogue between its artists-in-residence. In each session the artists will be given agency to shape their conversations in ways that best express their artistic languages in relation to one-another. Through their first-person account the talks will provide valuable insights into their practices and working processes and will also be an opportunity to hear their thoughts on wider questions regarding art practice, the process of forming one’s own artistic language, among other topics. One after another, this series of conversation will amount to a unique overview of a wide range of practitioners from diverse socio-cultural and disciplinary backgrounds. And will also allow for an informal setting for peer-to-peer exchange and community building, extending outwards through the online platforms to engage with the art students based in Finland, and with many other publics around the world.

As institutions with a long history of hosting and nurturing the artistic development of practitioners in pivotal moments of their career, the Jan van Eyck Academie, the Rijksakademie, the Saastamoinen Foundation and the Academy of Fine Arts, Uniarts, once again place the emphasis on and give agency to artistic practice.

Some of the projects discussed in this programme are part of Education from Below, a two-year collaborative programme organised between the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam, MACBA, Barcelona and WHW, Zagreb. The projects realised in this framework were also developed in partnership with Framer Framed, Amsterdam. Education from Below is co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.