Welcome to the Studium Generale Rietveld Academie website! To encourage critical making and thinking, Studium Generale offers a diverse and transdisciplinary programme every year on an urgent theme. Read more about the set-up and structure here.

This website consists of 3 substantive and informative layers that constantly feed each other.

The Programme Overview home page displays announcements of ongoing events and activities, and provides instant access to their live streams when appropriate.

Below the Programme overview is the Archive Picks area, which presents varying selections of older programme contributions, curated by guests or by ourselves. Older contributions can thus regain attention or meaning, or be presented in alternative arrangements.

At the bottom is the Archive. There you will find material from 2011 to the present: part of the video-recorded contributions to the annual conference of Studium Generale and since March 2020 also recordings of events and presentations of the preliminary programmes. The archive is searchable in various ways and offers a chronological overview of previous editions and links to the associated project websites. It also contains announcements and descriptions of previous programme components, which can no longer be relived, but do provide some glances in the histories of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie.

The purpose of the website is to inform and present what is happening at the moment, but it is also a memory, in which a lot can be found and unexpected encounters can take place.

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N.B. This website is still under construction! Not everything has been completed yet and the search functions in the Archive are not yet fully functional.

Declassified in Part
Özgür Kar

This video presentation addresses the recent political reality in Turkey through different forms of evidence: official, classified documents on the state of affairs in the country are combined with amateur smartphone footage published online. The video parses these documents with their varied emotional registers, revealing fragments of online videos and written reports, moments of violence and solidarity contrasted by the bureaucratic documents whose form of power seems devoid of any emotion. The video thereby takes the viewer on a confusing, sad and violent journey, juxtaposing highly emotional footage sourced online with official content, pointed to the mediated political reality that the internet makes available.

Özgür Kar is an artist living and working in Amsterdam. His main area of interest is online video addiction, escapism and resistance fatigue. His recent video works deal with the state of complete immersion in the mediated realities of online video. His videos are based on user-created content and a mediated eye. They examine the current state of our collective anxieties, and today’s diminished “reality” through reassessing and rearranging the online artefacts of moving image. After graduating from Gerrit Rietveld Academie in 2015, he is now a participant in the Critical Studies Department of Sandberg Institute.