Graduates mentioned: Timo Demollin, Loidys Carnero, Anastasia Kubrak, Juan Pablo Mejía, Rein Verhoef

Graduates mentioned: Alice Dos Reis, Loidys Carnero

Graduates mentioned: Nagare Willemsen, Sherida Kuffour

Graduates mentioned: Tatsuhiko Togashi, Alice dos Reis, Asja Keeman, Niels Albers, Johanna Arco, Malissa Canez Sabus, Gauthier Chambry, Tom Kemp, Gijs Velsink, Cécile Tafanelli, Thom Driver, Angelo Custódio, Júlia Carvalho de Aguiar

Graduates mentioned: Sherida Kuffour, Gauthier Chambry, Angelo Custódio, Mavi Veloso, Juan Pablo Mejía

Graduates mentioned: Timo Demollin, Johanna Arco,
Anastasia Kubrak, Juan Pablo Mejía, Niels Albers

Graduates mentioned: Tatsuhiko Togashi, Timo Demollin, Johanna Arco, Loidys Carnero, Niels Albers, Liene Pavlovska, Juan Pablo Mejía, Asja Keeman

Graduates Mentioned: Andrea López Bernal, Andy G. Vidal, Anna Laederach, Giovanni Bozzoli, Lotte Hardeman, Nagare Willemsen, Quentin Dupuy, Tom Kemp

In my work with the Collective Liberation Project, I explore issues relating to identity politics and generate strategies to support people who are marginalised by power structures that maintain systems of oppression including racism, sexism and transphobia. In the last year, I have done a series of trainings with staff and students at Sandberg Institute to increase diversity intiatives. Based on my interests, I have chosen to write about the work of the following Sandberg graduates: ‘Chasing Lizards… And other memories’ by Sherida Kuffour, ‘Truque-trrrah’ by Mavi Veloso and the final project of  Nagare Willemsen. All three artists are making work about the politics of their identities and how they navigate this in a context in which they are viewed as “other”. 

Selecting artists and works based on only a few images, short texts and hyperlinks is quite close to the position of the tourist. At best tourism means exploring, encountering something new. At worst, it makes anything that has a certain ‘locale’, that is idiosyncratic, only more spectacular.

How do we think beyond frameworks, borders, binaries, limits and language? What strategies can we use to create a deeper understanding of one another, to engage a plurality of communities, and to give room to critical voices? These and other questions on the intersection of themes such as gender, the body, human behaviour, race, migration and technology are explored by this selection of artists. 

Although many of the graduates’ pages have yet to be filled, it would already be possible to devise some red threads, tendencies or themes from what’s there. But that’s not what I’m going to do here. To me it makes more sense to approach the graduation shows as I would normally do, and that means that I will be looking for individual qualities, more precisely from the P/////AKT point of view. And that means that my main interest will go out to the Fine Arts and Dirty Arts departments as well as the Studio For Immediate Spaces.

Becoming part of an unknown creature or organism defined by its twenty-four body parts is a most welcoming approach to a journey I am invited to provide a map for.

A newly recruited night security guard at the Museum of Natural History discovers that an ancient curse causes the animals and exhibits on display to come to life and wreak havoc. I suggest visitors of the Sandberg Instituut Graduation Exhibitions and Events to experience their visit along the lines of Larry Daley´s (Ben Stiller) position in 'Night at the Museum' (2006). 

After hearing many people discussing the documentary on the 11 fountains in Friesland that were recently commissioned in the context of ‘Leeuwarden Cultural Capital of Europe’, I decided to watch the first episode of that documentary. Besides a clash between people from outside and within the art world, there was a second repeating element in the documentary: the question whether or not to compromise based on the reactions, condition, and resources of your surroundings. This question is not limited to artists and their work, but is about tolerance in a much broader context.

This text emerges from an investigatory journey to Athens, where the Dirty Art Department stages their graduation show They Swore It Could Talk to Dogs in the Bageion Hotel. Synthesising the projects of the entire class, I stumbled across the multivalent notion of “default”, particularly inspired by Nagare Willemsen’s thesis The precarious body. Default takes on multiple forms.