Base for
Experiment
Art &
Research

Tom K Kemp is a British visual artist. He uses roleplaying game design, group improvisation and animation to parse the eerie consequences of global systems on intimate and immediate human relations. His films, games and animations generate semi-autonomous Weird fictions, where gamification and collaborative storytelling are combined into a deviated method of complexity modeling. Kemp was a resident of the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, and studied with the School of The Damned, an autonomous free art pedagogy programme in the UK, before completing his Masters with the Dirty Art Department, Sandberg Instituut, NL. He has exhibited at and worked with La Casa Encendida, Madrid ES, Rupert, Vilnius LT, Quad, Derby UK, MKG Hamburg, DE and the Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam NL. Tom is the tutor of Digital Practices in year 1 and a practitioner for the students in following years. His course of digital practices focuses on broadcasting, aspects of puppetry and ventriloquism  - making objects move on their own, or making silent things talk.

Born in the city of Pasto, southwest Colombia, Ana Bravo-Pérez is an artist working mainly in the field of documentary film and the visual arts. Ana uses non-traditional places of expression to raise questions about the need to decolonise knowledge, history, aesthetics and filmmaking:  a pedestrian point in Rio de Janeiro, an academic conference venue in Sydney, a busy street in Buenos Aires or a Botanical Garden in Amsterdam… They all become spaces for her to publically manifest her concerns. Ana’s multimedia work evolves around decoloniality, migration and memory. Through migration and the research into the origin of the materials she works with -  celluloid, porcelain and gold -  her ritual-performances attempt to unveil the routes of colonisation  and to interrogate colonial canons. Ana Bravo-Pérez is our tutor of the AV classes in year 1 and practitioner for the following years.

The work of Swedish artist Josefin Arnell (b. 1984) circles around questions of stigma, control, and concealed trauma and, not least, the healing thereof. A contemporary mélange of trashy performativity and pink-hued hysteria, her upbeat and entertaining filmic universe has, over recent years, taken on questions of addiction, mental instability, and (powerless) dependence, focusing on society’s flipside. In one example prompted by personal health problems, Arnell created an opera about the power of tiny ticks and chronic Lyme disease, nicknamed the invisible disease— a looming threat in the Nordic countries. Elsewhere, the artist has worked with her alcoholic mother, in one instance filming her as mother and daughter venture to meet a world-famous Catholic healer in Brazil, as if trying to create a road-movie in reverse, turning back time on a childhood gone wrong.

“Can you engage in phenomenological mythology? I want both: the strong, graphical line you find in comic books and the pictorial, rich atmospherics of Impressionism.” - Derk Thijs Thijs graduated from the Constantijn Huygens Kunstakademie, Kampen and was a resident at De Ateliers and Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, both Amsterdam. His work has been exhibited at numerous locations, including De Kunsthal, Rotterdam, Cobra Museum, Amstelveen, Museum de Fundatie, Zwolle and Centraal Museum, Utrecht. Thijs’ work is at numerous represented in many private and public collections, including Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and Centraal Museum, Utrecht.   Thijs is tutor for 2D in the first year and a practitioner for the students in higher years.  

Zhana Ivanova’s practice centres on rearranging and reconfiguring daily patterns and systems to which we have grown accustomed. She often uses performance in order to artificially induce situations in which social and power relations fluctuate. Her constructions are initially formal and rule-governed; yet within them she insistently exposes the ambiguity of her own rules.

Edwin Zwakman's work focuses on our relation with reality. He explores the connection between reality and photography, creates artistic interventions in public spaces, or develops semi-architectonic structures. His works are shown all over the world.

Vincent Vulsma researches processes of cultural, political and economical appropriation. He shows that processes of artistic production are closely connected with modern ways of trade and labor. By manipulating objects Vulsma highlights the idea of its 'artwork-being', by doing so he changes the status and value of objects.

Hester Oerlemans' work mostly consists of statues and images in the public sphere, installations and drawings. She constantly searches and researches new forms and new places. She appropriates a place by adding something to it, in order to give it back. At first sight her work does not look like art at all. The goal is to change consisting situations and let viewers look multiple times.

Gijs Assmann works as a painter, draftsman and sculptor. His work raises various questions and he plays with expactations of his viewers by using unexpected forms and materials. He combines morbidity with cartoonesque humor, and by doing so he creates different layers of significance.

Korrie Besems focusses in her photographic projects on the continuing transformation process of Dutch landscapes. She studies the expiry date of designed landscapes. Her work is almost a direct representation, she shows its surrounding. By a seemingly objective gaze she moves between ethos and critical analysing.