Masters of Art and Design announces
a new two-year programme in Art and Education
Application deadline: 20 June 2012
Be realistic, demand the impossible
School of Missing Studies
“There is an increasing crisis in public space; cultural education has never been so close yet so far removed from cultural production. It has fallen far behind more generative forces for the perception of culture, such as politics and the economy. Education and learning need to reclaim their territory as they provide a means to participate in politics and a force for creating forms of political socialization.”
–Bik Van der Pol, course director
Urgency
The collective public space of discourse requires certain conditions in order to be able to critically explore the ethics and aesthetics of the potential of art in relation to the public, the public good, and the public space. Taking the notion of ‘school’ as a thinking model, understanding education and learning as a space of experience and deploying education as a strategy for emancipation, the School of Missing Studies is a research model for the realization of missing studies, a platform for meetings and experimental learning.
Course
Understanding education as a ‘place of practice’, our aim is to develop, disclose, and articulate (artistic) work in dialogue with practices developed in other fields of knowledge and to explore if and where art produces a public sphere. The process of doing, and learning how to continuously form society on a day-to-day basis, is a form of (self)education where dialogue is a major mode of transfer. In order to increase opportunities for diversification, the School of Missing Studies explores the potential of the dialogical model, understood as much more than an exchange, namely a constant negotiation of knowledge between citizens.
Students
We welcome a maximum of 12 students from varied backgrounds including arts, design, architecture, and social and urban sciences, with a clear interest in the world around them, who are eager to critically address urgent issues of collectivity and public space, and who have already developed a solid basis through their practice. Students who successfully complete the Master’s degree programme will be awarded either a Master’s degree in Fine Art (MFA) or a Master of Design (MDes) degree, according to which is more applicable.
For information about the admission requirements, application process and selection criteria, please see here. Last application date: June 20, 2012 (start of programme september 2012).
Bik Van der Pol
The artistic practice of Bik Van der Pol is collective; leaving the studio as a place of production and using the artistic workplace itself—practice—as the location for research and production. This is a conscious political and artistic choice, and also sets the conditions for a practice and a (social) space, generated by dialogue and collaboration where an encounter may happen that might result in a work of art. www.bikvanderpol.net
School of Missing Studies
The title of the programme is taken from the School of Missing Studies, a project initiated by Bik Van der Pol in 2003, in collaboration with artists, thinkers, and architects. The programme is seeking / experimenting / causing new modes of operandi for the production of knowledge and looking to find ways of applying these as education in the form of artistic practice. When understood as a means for forming and transferring knowledge, this can open up new ways for understanding in society.
Sandberg Instituut
The Sandberg Instituut responsible for the Masters’ programs of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam has the aim to prepare her talented artists for the outside world at the highest level. To do so Sandberg Instituut focuses on the individual talents and needs of her artists. In the Masters’ programmes the individual artistic research and artistic growth has priority, although different angles are presented and artists are also seduced to step outside their primarily chosen artistic path.
