News

DDW 2017 Review

Willem de Kooning Academy
Fri 10 Nov
Under the title Presenting Pioneers we showed the work of six of our finest alumni at Dutch Design Week 2017.

Presenting Pioneers - Dutch Design Week 2017  - Temporary Art Center 21-29 October

Under the title Presenting Pioneers we proudly presented the outstanding performances of a group of our recent year's promising graduates at Dutch Design Week 2017, to illustrate what being a 'creating pioneer' is about. Through this exhibition we represented ourselves as an institute in an international context, and offered the alumni an exceptional opportunity to do so themselves. Together with teachers and staff we made a selection of promising projects, where each practice was represented by two young artists:

Autonomous Practices
Esmay Wagemans – New Humanity
Pip Passchier – Offside

Commercial Practices
Marten van Middelkoop – Matter of Time
Amy Guyt – Hard Facts, Soft Interpretations

Social Practices
Elise Marcus – Mother Earth Network
Charlotte Jansen – The Collaboration Coat

The graduation took place last summer, which gave the artists an opportunity to develop the projects further and to present new versions of work at DDW.

An inventive exhibition design

Alumni Dennis Vedder and Joep Brouwer were invited to create an inventive exhibition design. They developed a next step in WdKA’s existing design concept for presentation, first used during the Finals ’17 event. The deliberately basic frameworks offer endless possibilities for different forms of presentation. Within the DDW exhibition these frameworks provided a grid of clean lines, highlighting the works themselves. A glossy handout was designed to match the exhibition visually.

The exhibition was a part of an extended programme in the Temporary Art Centre, centrally located in Eindhoven. Besides the Willem de Kooning Academy there were also exhibitions by other art education institutes: Artemis, HKU, Artez, St. Joost, Maastricht Academy of Fine Arts. Among the exhibited institutes the WdKA distinguished itself with a tight selection of works and clean presentation.

As a whole, Dutch Design Week is growing more and more into an event with an open character and a broad audience. This is proved by rising numbers of visitors to the TAC location, with a first estimate of 22.000, 6000 more than in 2016. It also shows in the fact that the audience becomes more diverse. Besides the expected professionals there were schoolkids and lots of non-professional casual visitors.

We were also happy to welcome three representatives of the Rotterdam Municipality Department of Sports and Culture. They were eager to see what Rotterdam has to offer in the department of design. WdKA’s own Myrna van de Water and Bram Verhoef showed them around the exhibition.

On Wednesday October 25th TAC hosted a Pecha Kucha event. Our alumni were enthusiastic to participate and gave the typical short presentations. Friday October 28th the third edition of the Beyond Social event took place at the theatre in the TAC. The programme included the celebratory launch of three publications, which are a part of the Hybrid Publishing Research Awards series. It continued with talks on the theme Reclaiming Privacy by Design.

We thank the Dutch Design Week and the Temporary Art Centre for having us!

(Review by Fay van der Wall)

Marten van Middelkoop: “I spoke to a lot of interesting people expressing a positive interest in my work!”

Charlotte Jansen: “Dutch Design Week was a lot of fun, I’m curious to see if I get any visible results out of it. If anything, I’ve gained a great experience.”

Elise Marcus: “Some of the conversations I had, have the potential to lead to results, business-wise. The most special encounter was with a man who had completely turned around his life after an experience with the hallucinogenic drug Ayahuasca. He felt very connected and touched by the spiritual layer in my work. I loved seeing that.”

Amy Guyt: “At first I was afraid that the visitors would not understand my work in its new form of presentation and without me present. Fortunately, that was not the case! I have received emails from visitors who are interested in buying my work or reading my thesis. I loved the fact that people really took their time to explore my work and talk to me.”

Pip Passchier: “Both the location and the exhibition design were great. I did struggle a bit with placing myself and my work within the context of the Dutch Design Week. Because of that I have learned a lot, and it was a good test case for my T-shirt printing. The best outcome was the interest from the municipality of Rotterdam. They have contacted me and we are now exploring the ways we can collaborate.”