News

Research Awards 2018, the Winners!

Willem de Kooning Academy
Sun 8 Jul
Bachelor and Master

About Research & Hybrid Publishing Awards

The WdKA Research Award was established by the Willem de Kooning Foundation in 2015 to emphasize the central role of art and design research within the newly introduced curriculum. The Willem de Kooning Research Awards are not prizes for just theses or research documents but for projects merging theory and practice where art or design work is a vital part of the research. Research Award and Hybrid Publishing Award ceremony for both Bachelor and Master graduates took place on July 8th.

And the winners are:

Bachelor Research Awards

First Award: Rümeysa Önal

"The first prize of the WdKA Research Award 2018, €1.500.-,  will go to Rümeysa Önal for her graduation project "Stories on Hold", with its artistic research of animation as an inclusive media culture. In elegant and convincing ways, social science and neuropsychological research on the effect of stories on people of different ages serve as the basis for Rümeysa's choice of story and medium."

Second Award

The jury had been asked to appoint three prize winners. The first winner (Rümeysa) was unanimous. For the second and third prize, the jury found three projects to be of equal quality. After a long discussion, it decided to give a prize of 500 Euro to each of these three projects: "Here" by Robert-Jonathan Koeyers, "Naturalisation into a country that does not exist" by Arieke van Liere and "Am I Missing Something?" by Kamali van Bochove."

Jury Bachelor Research Award: Florian Cramer – chairman (WdKA), Jojanneke Gijsen – secretary (WdKA), Hilde Westerink (Vers Beton), Klaas Kuitenbrouwer (Het Nieuwe Instituut), Liesbeth Eelens (Erasmus University College).

Master Research Award

Amy Pickles

"Several of the jury members recognised the urgency of Amy’s research question from their own practices as art educators. Amy Pickles shows a strong dedication to her subject matter by pushing the pedagogical tools she invokes the various experiments to their very limits. There is a great consistency between her written work and her presentation. The performance, which the jury was able to witness partially, was modest yet powerful. As mentioned earlier, the jury took concern with the articulation of positionalities in the works of the nominees. Although Amy clearly stated in the research document that she does not want to take a position, she, at the same time, did not silence its history. The jury felt a sense of comfortableness in her work and was appreciative of this intellectual doubt and cautiousness. They would like to stimulate Amy to keep on “resetting the machine” and to implement her research and work in an institutional setting." Congratulations on your prize of €2.000.-!

Jury Master Research Award: Teana Boston-Mammah – chairman (WdKA), Mariska Versantvoort – secretary (WdKA), Rieke Vos (NDSM-werf), Annette Krauss (Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, HKU Utrecht), Marina Otero Verzier (Het Nieuwe Instituut).

Hybrid Publishing Awards

 BA – Nienke Galjaard

"The story, motivation and the object of the soap itself nicely come together, it’s an elegant and generous project and shines a light on the Syrian refugees. A relevant and timely topic related to integration and acceptation and (in)visibility of certain groups within our society. The writing on the soap has a poetic feel to it – vanishing when used and becoming part of you – and opens up interesting experimentations with publishing. We see a lot of potential in the documentation of the installation, the inscription in the soap and the stories of the Syrian refugees. A project worth spreading to a wider audience to make the Syrian refugee less anonymous, as Nienke stated as being her goal of this project."

MA – Amy Pickles

"The jury was impressed by the combination of the different media and presentation forms in Amy’s project and how they all connect. The style of her thesis is an essential part of this and becomes a performance artwork by itself. The polyvocality is an interesting approach to communicating her topic, the imagination of counter-discourse by using scripts and contrasting it with performance. It opens up interesting questions for a hybrid publication, playing with the multiplicity and richness of the sounds/work/words? In publishing this work we hope this multiplicity of layers can become accessible, readable and audible to a wider audience. A fine balance between voices."

 

Jury Hybrid Publishing (BA & MA): Aldje van Meer – chairman (WdKA), Kimmy Spreeuwenburg – secretary (WdKA Hybrid Publishing), Freek de Lomme (Onomatopee), Margreet Riphagen (HvA), Silvio Lorusso (PZI).

View this year's nominees here.