Naomi van Dijck

Artist and curator Naomi van Dijck explores ways of producing differently and how we can learn from existing structures to do so.
Her practice is committed to creating horizontal structures that facilitate collaborative spheres for cross-disciplinary learning, resulting in a doubled practice where learning is both the production and that which is produced. Here, the focus lies on ties and bounds, information and resources, to make artistic practice inherently sustainable rather than concentrated on its intrinsic logic. A further interest in methods of usership and collective knowledge within online and offline networks motivates her to deploy generative, discursive and performative forms like workshops and platforms informed by a variety of disciplines.
Naomi completed her Bachelor in Fine-Arts at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy (2015) and her Masters in Curatorial Practice at the Glasgow School of Art and the University of Glasgow (2018). Her continous peer, pedagogical researcher and mother, has inspired her to use curricilar design studies in her work. She currently practices both as an artist and as a freelance curator in Glasgow, which includes her work as an assistant curator for the Scottish Pavillion at the Venice Biennale for Architecture 2018 and her work as a producer for urban place-making and comunity arts organisation WAVEparticle. As a self-taught coder she also creates websites and web-applications for cultural purposes that cross-influence her practice. She is co-founder of FLING; a Glasgow/London based network platform of emerging artists and curators that learn together. Besides frequent exhibitions she curates, hosts or participates in, independent projects include sandbox studio (learning network) and The Following Doesn’t Exist (durational podcast-exhibition).

What cannot be learned?
Change can only be learned by doing. 

What can people learn from you?
How to shape ‘institutional’ frameworks after their users and how to share these models to inspire their widespread use. Informed by Self-Determination Theory (Ryan & Decy) these models foster the intrinsic motivation to engage with art, rather than to force an introjection of imposed regulations upon its users. I can share my experience of how my experimental cross-disciplinary education has done so in the past and how it has in turn informs my work in urban palcemaking and social design.

What do you want to unlearn?
It is curious that while the understanding of the exhibition as a knowledge space grew, our ways to use its language became increasingly universalised? The language of curatorial - as we came to know it - of white walls, plinths and well-meant explanations enriched with neologisms, might not be as innoscent as it claims itself to be. In persuing clarity a universalised knowledge of how to present art, we might run the risk of excluding a lot of knowledges we forgot to look at, or have arguable never found. In a knowledge space, the question of what is inclusive exhibition design goes much further than accesibility. I want to unlearnt the curatorial rethoric. In doing so, I will have to asume that after the fall of curatorial logic, everyone can be an expert. This can be anyone, from interaction designers to dancers and from Zen philosophers to primaty school teachers. Uptil now, I have had the pleasure to work with all of the above.
 

Under the patronage of

Deutsche UNESCO Kommission

Supported by

Thüringen

Organized by

Media and event partners

BauNetz
Bauwelt
Brandeins
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