Feature
What’s the Offer? 2018 Open Studios Liesbeth Bik and PZI MFA classes of 2018 and 2019
Under the title What’s The Offer?, the Piet Zwart Institute Master Fine Art opened its doors and welcomed visitors into their studio spaces for a peek into the range of practices, realities, and narratives that the program fosters. The students’ collective dynamics brought a spatial flow to the whole building, setting the scene for a full open day program that included: custom-made guided tours through the studios, where individual presentations were installed and which extended through hallways, stairs, and other in-between spaces; a special live radio show broadcasting interviews, lectures, performances, and songs into every studio space; a collectively assembled library of annotated texts available for the taking; intimate “shelvies,” showing current student reading; specially designed posters and leaflets, and envelopes for collecting small artworks from each of the students en-route; a bar offering specialized drinks in handmade glasses, to circulate through the digestive system; an engraving workshop customizing personal objects, trash, recyclables and bicycle bells; a cinema showing video works by the students; and a public display of storage overflowing with leftovers as an improvised salon presentation of what is usually stored away.
What’s The Offer? (Open Day/Open Studios, 10 February 2017) was brought together by Timur Akhmetov, Sophie Bates, Shraddha Borawake, Katharina Cameron, Teddy Coste, Larisa David, Jānis Dzirnieks, Ramon Feller, Jakob Forster, Josje Hattink, Marta Hryniuk, Lili Huston-Herterich, Alexander Iezzi, Honey Jones-Hughes, Merve Kılıçer, Anne Kolbe, Johanna Kotlaris, Matheline Marmy, George Nesbitt, Collette Rayner, Marco Rizzardi, Victor Santamarina, Bobby Sayers, Anastasia Shin, Nicholas Thomas, and Sophie Varin, guided by Liesbeth Bik in association with the 2017–18 thematic project What’s the Offer? Exhibitioning Is a Verb! (Thinking, Making, Reading: What Do Exhibitions Do?).”
