Graduates Highlights 2024
Marie Caye, Piet Zwart Instituut
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Nesie Wang, KABK
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Miranda Kistler, KABK
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Cecilie Fang, KABK
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Rutger van Aken, Rietveld Academie
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Sharon Vreeburg, ArtEZ
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Rizq Naherta, ArtEZ
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Hannah Staal, WdKA
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Marta Ramirez, HKU
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Kane de Jong, AKS St Joost
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Isa Bongers, AKI
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Marie Caye, Piet Zwart Instituut - Nesie Wang, KABK - Miranda Kistler, KABK - Cecilie Fang, KABK - Rutger van Aken, Rietveld Academie - Sharon Vreeburg, ArtEZ - Rizq Naherta, ArtEZ - Hannah Staal, WdKA - Marta Ramirez, HKU - Kane de Jong, AKS St Joost - Isa Bongers, AKI -
The beginning of summer marks the start of the yearly art academy graduation exhibitions.
Art students across the country will display their graduation projects and will show us what is in store for the next generation of art.
As an accessible magazine for art and culture, Simulacrum wants to zoom in on different artists in different areas and highlight shows that should not be missed. Art students were able to respond to an open call, resulting in a strong mix of influences. Here follows a round up of some graduating artists of 2024.
Marta Ramirez - HKU Fine Arts (26 - 30 June)
As you enter my hometown in Spain, you are greeted by a carved stone in the cemetery door with the inscription "Aqui os esperamos" ("We wait here for you"), a constant reminder of life’s continuity that deeply influences my work. In my paintings, I blend tradition, folklore and memory while I try to understand the gradual loss of my roots and preserve the cultural narratives that have shaped me.
Inspired by Federico García Lorca's poem "Nana del caballo grande", a lullaby about the story of a horse that explores themes of mortality and resilience. This narrative is central to my paintings, featuring powerful horse figures created with bold brushstrokes and heavy materials. Each painting serves as a sculptural piece, balancing strength and fragility, the horrible and the delicate. The decorative mural in my exhibition space replicates the tilework from my childhood home, reflecting the importance of storytelling in Spanish culture.
Marta Ramirez (29), a Spanish painter graduating from HKU Fine Arts in 2024, merges tradition, folklore, and memory in her work. Influenced by literature and her cultural roots, her powerful paintings balance strength and fragility, reflecting on mortality and resilience.
Kane de Jong - AKV St Joost (27 – 30 June)
Entropolis tells the story of an inner search for a world of time without a clock. Doubts about reality and a creeping sense of dissociation make it difficult for Kane to keep a grip on the passage of time, which is why their project also questions the definition of time. For our brain, the passage of time is nothing more than a comparison between two states. However, what happens when we are no longer able to make this comparison, and how do you then relate to clock time?
The slide projectors in the installation follow the rhythm of Canto Ostinato, a piece of music written to make one reflect on space and time. The setup represents a clockwork and shows images of long walks. In doing so, Kane takes the era of Romanticism, in which wandering was seen as an escape from, among other things, industrial pastimes as an example.
Kane de Jong is a photographer, installation artist and curator based in The Netherlands. Their work is focused on the development of mental health in order to better understand ones reality. Kane’s art is strongly influenced by science and philosophy. @entropolis_project
Marie Caye - Piet Zwart Instituut (29 June - 6 July )
This work is a reinterpretation of an ancient sculptural symbol from Auvergne called “le retournement”. In this iconography, the lower part of the body is considered animal and vile and so the figures try to flip their legs towards their upper body, the more spiritual part. This gesture echoes our original ecological sin: separating our bodies just like we separated ourselves from the rest of nature. The installation is activated by the audience that can place the sculptures in water and let them break down, dissolving at the same time this dividing logic. Plunging the twisted and knotted figure in water unravels them back into a landscape.
Marie Caye is a visual artist from Auvergne based in Rotterdam. She is fascinated by the notion of hybridity as a way to hold opposing forces, dualities or incompatibilities which she expresses through drawing and sculpture. This exploration often happens on the stage set by decay and disappearance.
Nesie Wang - KABK (27 juni – 2 juli)
At the Dexing Copper Mine in China, copper mining has marked landscape by infertility and toxicity. Despite these adverse conditions, mine workers have adopted part-time gardening on this very land, engaging in an almost paradoxical act of nurturing the soil that their primary occupation continues to degrade.
Looking into the interconnectedness between mine workers and the land through their labour in mining and gardening, I explore the complex exchanges between what people extract from the land and what the land, in its altered state, takes in return. Through engaging with the miners who have turned part of their lives to gardening, I seek to uncover the personal narratives that weave through their daily lives, reflecting on their bond with the altered land beneath their feet.
From a mixed-media approach that combines photography, video documentation, and copper plate etching prints made from tailing sand collected from the mine, this project investigates the interactions between human and nonhuman forces that are central to this infertility.
Video work: In the Trace of Tilled Stones, 20 minutes. 2024.
Nesie Junyi Wang (b. 1998, China) navigates the boundary between traditional disciplines, utilising photography, interdisciplinary collaborations, and material research to probe the complex interactions between humans and the more-than-human world. Her work is grounded in relational thinking, viewing existence as a fluid, interconnected web. This outlook compels her to question established knowledge structures and transcend rigid categorizations, inviting a reconsideration of our place within the broader ecological fabric.
Miranda Kistler - KABK (27 juni – 2 juli)
Batu dan Banjir
We all move in an interconnected stream, reminding us of the impermanence in all things. Erosion, commonly found along watercourses, carves stones and land into mesmerizing patterns, symbolizing gradual shedding. It can also metaphorically represent the slow destruction or diminution of something.
The work „Batu dan Banjir“ contrasts archival images of my grandmother which have been carved by reoccurring flooding with contemporary perspectives of the observation of the Rhine River from its beginning to its end where it observes the transformation and shapeshifting of stones and sediments. This work explores the interplay between nature and human experiences, showcasing the traces of erosion within the cultural testimonies and natural processes.
The materiality of archival images and stones reveals their interaction with the environment, displaying water‘s impact on both people and nature. Erosion becomes a metaphor for impermanence, displacement, geographical and cultural flow, relocation, adaptation, and readjustment to an ever-changing environment.
The work consists of an immersive publication and a tapestry. The tapestry is a knitted translation that highlights the carved imprints on the archival images. Making them tactile and touchable.
The tapestry was produced at TextilLab Tilburg,
Miranda Devita Kistler is a visual artist from Switzerland. She studied at the Zurich University of the Arts and is now currently graduating from Bachelor of Photography at the Royal Academy of Arts, The Hague. Her work thematically is driven by the fascination of exploring the commonly known substantiality of the environment from multiple perspectives.
Cecilie Fang - KABK (27 juni – 2 juli)
Cecilie Fang is an anti-disciplinary artist and writer from China and Denmark currently based in The Hague. She researches power structures through and with language; how language is not fixed and how words are inherently violent.
Her work explores alternative ways of languaging while looking upon language as an ecosystem - and where that leaves the speaking, listening, reading, and writing body
Credits: photos; Cecilie Fang, sound design; Andrejs Poikāns
Rutger van Aken - Rietveld (3 – 7 juli)
Unpopulism is a book containing a collection of objects produced and branded by Dutch local and national political parties. It is an inquiry into the workings of the promotional commodity used by nearly every political party of the Netherlands, how it intrudes into the life of the individual and lays bare the disconnect between the sloganeering, yet lifeless object and the immediate need for change in the real world.
The inherent boredom of politics and the entertainment of commodities has synthesised into a demand for a combination of the two: an entertaining politics. If we understand entertainment’s objective as maximising attention at each moment, we can see how its distractions defeat boredom again and again, including in the arena that is politics. Populist demagogues have learned how to exploit this type of politics, turning it into a spectacle which takes hold of dinner table conversations, newspaper headlines and talk shows with little effort. But how do non-populist parties attempt to exploit an entertaining politics? What happens when milquetoast political rhetoric becomes replaced, or supplemented with the party-branded commodity? Can politics become entertaining by putting a logo on something unexpected? A condom or birdhouse? An inflatable couch or flip flops?
Rutger van Aken is a 29-year-old graphic designer from Utrecht, currently in his graduation year at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. His practice is orientated towards the inherently political and capitalist nature of graphic design, with both textual and visual archived material used frequently throughout his work.
Sharon Vreeburg - ArtEZ (3 – 7 juli)
CONTRADICTION
Through this stop-motion film Sharon explores the experience of twin identities in our Western individualistic society. How are twins perceived bysingletons and how do twins perceive themselves? What are misconceptions or stereotypes of twins? How is twinship both a blessing and a curse? She also asks herself: Do I see myself as a fully formed individual person or will my twin always be a part of me? Who am I, if not a twin?
Sharon’s partly autobiographical film ‘Contradiction’ offers a unique journey through various scenarios and experiences, reflecting both the lives of twins and her own personal story. Using the whimsical and dynamic medium of stop-motion animation, the film adds a touch of humor to its narrative, so don’t be weirded out if you suddenly spot a real beetle crawling through a Jarmusch style coffeeshop…
Sharon Vreeburg (she/her). Through time her practice and research developed a specific focus on the exploration of identity, masquerade and performativity. Now her research focuses on the exploration of twin identities within Western society. Through the medium of stop-motion animation she explores the contradictions within twinship and challenges ideas and misconceptions about twins.
Rizq Naherta - ArtEZ (3 – 7 juli)
Project ITC is a long-term artistic initiative that goes into practicality, participation, archiving, and queer community-building. The project creates a platform in the margins of institutions by reclaiming pre-existing space to recirculate predominantly Southeast-Asian queer knowledge production through workshops, participations, and informal archiving. One part of the project is an installation and participatory work where it’s redistributing majorly non-western queer films to the audience as they can exchange it with a queer story. The installation is reminiscent of bootleg shops in Jakarta where it acts as a space for recirculating media and oral stories. In collaboration with Queer Indonesia Archive, there are selected archival materials of queer Indonesian magazines and pictures reproduced from their collection which exist mundanely in the space. Another part of the project is the community building aspect, focusing on workshops, panel talks, learning through archives, film screenings, and gatherings for queer diaspora communities of Southeast-Asia.
Rizq Naherta (they/them/dia) is a Javanese-Minangnese transdisciplinary artist and researcher based in Arnhem, The Netherlands. They consider themselves as a spatial jockey, where their practice goes into different spatial mashups, being in-between places and context to create possibilities in the margins of institutions. Their works often present elements of archiving, sampling, reading, performing, administrating, writing, filming, lecturing, installing, researching, blasting, scripting, collaborating, and mundanity. They question how production of knowledge transmits and recirculates in the global age, as they often center around the transmissions, spaces, and perspectives in heterogeneous South-East Asian cities.
Hannah Staal - WDKA (3 – 6 juli)
A reoccurring interest which I address through my artistic practice of performance, installations and self portraits, is the objectification of women.
I often use my own body as a site of making through the representation of female characters that yield a reflection on society and the norms I experience as a woman.
For this project the research goes into the voyeuristic aspect of social media and how this affects the way women are viewed in our society. I am using ‘the peepshow’ as a physical representation to show this. Peep shows act as a concept and base structure for the work I have created. The peep show works as a translation of the objectification of women and a space to interrogate the male gaze. My project and the grounding research show that comparisons can easily be drawn between the voyeuristic behavior and environments of peep shows and our current use of social media, both heavily relying on the perpetuation of the relationship between the objectification of women and the male gaze.
Hannah Staal (23) is an artist who just graduated from the Willem De Kooning Academy where she studied Fine Arts. She is a multidisciplinary artist who mainly works with performance art and installations. Her work revolves around the topics of womanhood, selfhood and the male gaze. She likes to use herself as a medium to help translate these topics to her audience. She lures in the viewer with a shiny object to send them off with new questions to think about.
Isa Bongers - AKI (5 – 12 juli)
‘Where I Pass By And Become’ focuses on the encounter that takes place on the border between private space and public space. An ever-changing encounter that continuously questions the relation between representation and reality. Every glance initiates the formation of a new relation between passer-by, image and environment. A reflection, on top of a reflection, on top of a reflection, repeated until everything is merging, moving, changing, disturbing, cracking and engaging in conversation. The work creates a space for the viewer to be intrigued by everyday movements and surroundings. To briefly explore a reality in which the glass window of a shop serves as more than a display of images and products: where it can serve as a place of meeting. How do we relate to the images we see in our public space? How do they influence us? Can we engage in conversation and find relationships between ourselves and the always present visual monologue?
Isa Bongers (2001, NL) is an artist researching and reflecting on visual culture and the way images appear to us in public space. Through observations, reflections, writing and conversations she attempts to understand and go against the images that try to convince us of longing for realities that can never exist.
