The Pressing Matter consortium is pleased to announce the open call for its artist residency programme in the Netherlands. Pressing Matter is a four-year research programme about colonial heritage and its legacies. Artists are invited to submit proposals that critically engage with the project’s aims.
Started in 2021, Pressing Matter is financed by the Dutch National Science Agenda (NWA) and coordinated from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Pressing Matter investigates the potentialities of ‘colonial objects’ to support societal attempts to deal with the colonial past and its afterlives, and with conflicting claims by different stakeholders for these objects within museums. The project will critically interrogate notions of ownership, value and return as a way of enabling more equitable futures.
Pressing Matter is done collaboratively with several museums in the Netherlands, whose collections are the central objects of study for the project. These partners are the National Museum of World Cultures, Museum Bronbeek, Museum Vrolik, Rijksmuseum, the museums of Utrecht University and Groningen University. In addition, several other academic and societal institutions are partners in the project. These include the Foundation Academic Heritage and the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Societal partners are Imagine IC, The Black Archives, HAPIN Papua Support Foundation, the Rijksakademie, Framer Framed and the Peace Palace Library, the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands and DutchCulture.
Pressing Matter connects fundamental theories of valuation and property to postcolonial debates on heritage, to develop and test, first, new theoretical models of value and ownership and, second, new forms of return that extend current approaches to heritage restitution. Central to the project’s aims is to develop a theory of object potentialities grounded in the entangled, multipolar histories in which colonial objects were collected, kept and made meaningful.
Participating artists are invited to think about the ways in which art practice can reimagine different forms of return, repair, and reconciliation broadly conceived, working with objects/collections in the partner museums collected during the colonial period.
The selected artist will contribute to the intellectual life of the project, including active participation in the repair lab, an on- and offline site for interdisciplinary and transnational conversation and experimentation about repairing historical injustices linked to museums and their collections.
Artists can use the residency to produce a new (body of) work or complete work already in progress that is germane to the questions of Pressing Matter. The artist in residence will be required to do public presentations to showcase work or research done during the residency.
Residencies last between 3-12 months and can start from September 2022. The residency programme will end in December 2024.
Offered by Pressing Matter:
- Travel expenses to the Netherlands (for artists living outside the Netherlands).
- Stipend, covering living costs in the Netherlands (including a contribution to accommodation) and negotiable depending on the type of project.
- Studio space at the Rijksakademie.
- Pressing Matter will provide suitable accommodation for successful applicants living outside the Netherlands.
- Material and production costs (TBD depending on project requirements).
