Tinguely Reloaded

On March 23 at the Museum Tinguely in Basel, former Metamatic Visiting Professor Emily Scott co-chaired the panel “Caught in the Circuits”  at the Metamatic Reloaded Symposium together with VAMA student Angela Bartholomew. Artists Soren Pors, Aparno Rao and Joao Simoes were the other participants. While at the VU as visiting professor last year, Emily taught the seminar “Art-Media Sites in the 1960s,” which Angela attended.

Play & Prosume

On March 5, the exhibition Play & Prosume will open at the Kunsthalle Wien, accompanied by a symposium featuring a number of VU University faculty members. The exhibition and symposium result from the HERA funded research project “Technology Exchange and Flow: Artistic Media Practices and Commercial Application”. It brings together the key research findings of the project research teams at Plymouth University, VU University Amsterdam and the University of Applied Arts Vienna together with contributions from the EYE Film Institute, Amsterdam and the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, Hilversum. A catalogue (Verlag für moderne Kunst) will accompany the exhibition, which includes contributions by the project partners about major findings, as well as reflections about key terms such as “serious games”, “interfaciality” or the “prosumer”. The character of texts ranges from essays, interviews, commented images to literary reflections.

Stedelijk Collection Highlights

More book news – but this time from a student rather than from staff members! On the occasion of the reopening of the Stedelijk Museum, Stedelijk Collection Highlights: 150 Artists from the Collection of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam presents a discussion of the most defining works of the Museum’s renowned art and design collection. VAMA student and Stedelijk intern Angela Bartholomew was highly involved in the development of the publication, authoring and editing many of the entries for the book including those with works by Nam June Paik, Ellsworth Kelly, Danh Vo, Gordon Matta-Clark, Mathias Poledna, Martha Rosler, Melvin Moti, Cady Noland, Jean Tinguely, Max Beckmann, Yael Bartana, Carl Andre, and Willem de Kooning, among others.

New Books

Mysteriously, some VU University faculty members and VAMA teachers still manage to find or make time to write books. In November, Amsterdam University Press published Koos Bosma‘s book Shelter City: Protecting Citizens Against Air Raids, which examines air-raid protection plans and structures  in Europe between 1933 and 1945. “Air Raid Protection represented an era: a mode of thought, a political and administrative concept, and a collection of technical and organisational measurements to protect citizens against attacks from the air. This book offers an interpretation of the Dutch, English and German air raid protection systems, and the construction of a Shelter City, parallel to the existing city. The reconstruction of Shelter City, of which some remnants still present themselves as theatrical memories or enjoy a fragmented existence in deeper layers of the earth, could be characterised with a medical metaphor: the historian must scan the urban body in order to imagine Shelter City. This insightful study explores the hidden traces of war, outlining ways of dealing with the physical remnants of air raid protection, which have long been useless but are still part of our landscapes.”

In March, Duke University Press will publish Ginette Verstreate‘s Tracking Europe. “Tracking Europe is a bold interdisciplinary critique of claims regarding the free movement of goods, people, services, and capital throughout Europe. Ginette Verstraete interrogates European discourses on unlimited movement for everyone and a utopian unity-in-diversity in light of contemporary social practices, cultural theories, historical texts, media representations, and critical art projects. Arguing against the persistent myth of borderless travel, Verstraete shows the discourses on Europe to be caught in an irresolvable contradiction on a conceptual level and in deeply unsettling asymmetries on a performative level. She asks why the age-old notion of Europe as a borderless space of mobility goes hand-in-hand with the at times violent containment and displacement of people.”

The spring will also see the publication of History in Motion by Sven Lütticken (Sternberg Press), which deals with the current “economy of time,” marked as it is by ubiquitous real-time media, and its impact on the representation and the production of history. More on that publication at some future moment.

VAMA Deadlines

If you are interested in applying for VAMA: the deadline for international applicants is April 1, or March 1 if you are also applying for a VU Fellowship Programme grant. The Art & Education announcement is here.

Architecture Lecture Denise Hagströmer

Swedish Embassy, New Delhi, 1959 (© Ake Eson Lindman)
Architects: Sune Lindströ and Goran Curman 

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In search of a national vision: Swedish embassies from the mid-20^th century to the present

Lecture by dr. Denise Hagströmer
Tuesday 30^th October
16:00, room 11A-06
VU University Amsterdam

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In her lecture Denise Hagströmer examines how national values are reflected and given solid form in Swedish embassies and residences. Through several case studies – namely the embassies in New Delhi, Madrid, Moscow, Tokyo and Berlin – she explores conceptions of national identity, modernity and progress, and the significance of Swedish national tradition. Although her research is mainly of a design-historical nature, Hagströmer also draws on other disciplines, including architectural history, the history of ideas, European ethnology, social history, political science and sociology. Her research provides an identification and analysis of the political and cultural processes behind Swedish design and architecture in its official representations. It also deconstructs Sweden’s ‘national modernisation’ project and provides an assessment of the social meaning of collectively perceived ‘tradition’.

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Denise Hagströmer is a Swedish design historian, based in London and Stockholm. MA Design History, Royal College of Art/Victoria and Albert Museum. Has curated exhibitions at the Design Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum; publishes and lectures in the UK, US and Europe. Publications include Swedish Design, (Swedish Institute, 2001) and ‘Sweden’ in K. Livingstone ed., International Arts and Crafts, (V&A, 2005). Senior lecturer at Konstfack, National College of Art and Design, Stockholm. Visiting Senior Lecturer at Uppsala University, Department of Art History (Sweden). From January 2013: Senior Curator, National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo, Norway, in charge of design.

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