OPEN CALL: Master of Arts in Fine Art & Design: Lens-Based Media at Piet Zwart Institute

Master of Arts in Fine Art & Design: Lens-Based Media (and Narrative Design elective study path) is a two-year postgraduate program that focuses primarily on artistic and experimental lens-based practices (both still and moving image/animation) that embrace the use of artifice, formal and technical innovation, fictional strategies and other unconventional visual approaches to create new and meaningful visions of the world.

We support visions that move beyond the conventional narratives of our society and create new impetus in the viewer towards an open-eyed engagement with myriad challenges humans (and non-humans) collectively face in a world saturated with disinformation, increasing polarisation and fragmentations of communities, centuries-old political and social injustices, marginalisation of the most vulnerable, and a rapidly degrading global environment.

Such work is necessarily based on a solid artistic research practice: allowing makers to take responsibility for the specificities and narratives of the images they create, and the complexities and histories of both the forms they employ and the topics they explore. However fictional the worlds we create, we must take responsibility for their claims to truth.

In September 2023 we are launching a new specialist study path: Narrative Design. As a specialisation within the core study path, the Narrative Design study path responds to the needs of students who want to engage more deeply with the narrative potential of the media they have chosen to work with. As part of the Narrative Design study path students will explore ways to harness the principles of narrative design, which have been developed over millennia, and to investigate contemporary narratological insights.

Students will learn to design narratives, which can act as organising principles for their transmedia artistic projects. They will participate in several Thematic Projects addressing specific narrative topics in addition to core Lens-Based Media Thematic Seminars. Each Thematic Seminar is taught by invited experts, who share their experience and narrative skills with students.

The course is taught by core tutors with a wide range of lens-based practices. Course director Simon Pummell is a BAFTA-winning filmmaker and animator, and Harvard Film Study Center Fellow. Sabine Groenewegen is an artist, filmmaker and editor whose feature film Odyssey (2018) won the Doclisboa Doc Alliance Award for Best Film. David Haines works with drawing, painting and video. Awards include the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize, Refresh Irinox Drawing Prize at Artissima, and the Jeanne Oosting Prize. Etienne Kallos is an award-winning filmmaker who received the Chéries-Chéris Grand Prix award for his feature film The Harvesters (2018). Ine Lamers is a widely-exhibited visual artist with a practice based in photography. Laura Huertas Millan is an artist and filmmaker and Harvard Film Study Center Fellow, whose work bridges cinema, contemporary art and research. Barend Onneweer runs the established film visual effects and post-production company R3MWERK. Rossella Nisio is a visual artist and current resident of the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten (Amsterdam). Her moving image works have been screened internationally. Lídia Pereira is an artist, researcher and current PhD candidate whose work focuses on the political economy of corporate social networks. Steve Rushton is a writer and artist. His publications include Experience, Memory, Re-enactment (2005, co-editor) and Masters of Reality (2011). Natasha Soobramanien is a writer. Her collaborative novel Diego Garcia, co-written with Luke Williams, won the 2022 Goldsmiths Prize. Stefanos Tsivopoulos is an interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker and organiser. He represented Greece at the 55th Venice Biennial and has exhibited extensively, including at documenta 14, the 2nd CAFAM Biënnale Beijing and Manifesta 8. For a list of recent guest tutors please visit our website.

Application requirements and procedure can be viewed online here. Deadline: The final deadline for applications from EU applicants is May 10, 2023.