Het Nieuwe Instituut

Together with Sound & Vision and the International Institute of Social History, Het Nieuwe Instituut is organising the third edition of Open Archive, in which four makers search open digital heritage collections for new stories, with new media works as the end result.

In line with this year’s UABB main theme ‘Urban Cosmologies’, Have we met? promotes new ways of understanding our planet as a shared space for plants, microbes, humans, and other animals. The exhibition was developed as the official Dutch contribution to the 23rd Triennale Milano and opened in July of 2022. Both condensed and expanded, Have we met? will be shown at Shenzhen's Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture from 25 November to 25 February 2023.

What does the sun have to tell us? Discover in the exhibition The Energy Show that solar energy has been veeeery important for a veeeeery long time and that designers of today are coming up with the smartest and prettiest ideas for working together with the sun. And you can contribute to this. Go on an expedition with the entire family! Create designs for a future with sustainable energy and unveil secret messages.

Collecting Otherwise introduces its newest trajectory, The Tool Shed: A Testing Ground for Tools and Methodologies, following on from Seen/Unseen (2021) and Post/De/Colonial (2022). By sharing developments and plans during this public gathering, Collecting Otherwise opens the floor to collectively identify the tools that can be made in this Tool Shed that will ultimately help us imagine, build and collect differently. The evening will feature presentations on the Tools in the Tool-Shed, as well as a presentation by Working Group member Harriet Rose Morley on her research Hard Work/Soft Work.

Does a fashion brand have to produce wearable clothing in order to create its own convincing world? In the Baby Blow Up project, fashion designer and artist Irene Ha experiments with an alternative design practice. 

Can we bring lost places back to life? In her project Wish I Were Here, theatre maker and social designer Thyrza Coenraad explores the feelings evoked by the current housing crisis using theatrical storytelling techniques. 

Designer Charlotte van Alfen has 66,000 photos on her phone. In the six years she's had the phone, she has never attempted to organise, categorise or delete these images, and every week she adds 140 new photos. She therefore identifies as an image hoarder. Through her work Into the Pile, she saw a chance to discover the origin of this urge to hoard photos. Surely she can’t be the only person who’s curious about this?

Now that physical walls, doors and borders offer no protection against the virtual privacy violations enabled by technology, what role can architecture still play in protecting privacy? Architect Arghavan Khaefi uses architectural resources to restore the privacy that we have lost in present times, especially in the digital domain. 

In search of more-than-human communication, designer Sander Blomsma takes us into the world of electromagnetic waves.  He wonders how humans, non-human life and inanimate matter experience ‘reality’, and what kind of contact and exchange we might imagine between them all, beyond science and philosophy. Blomsma uses radio, because everything – whether alive or inanimate – reacts and vibrates to these waves. In Radio Umwelt, he translates material and immaterial reality into perceptible sound using special antennas and audio equipment. Can we humans improve the way we relate to other species by literally becoming receivers?

For three months we give free rein to Charlotte van Alfen, Sander Blomsma, Thyrza Coenraad, Irene Ha and Arghavan Khaefi, each of whom will fill a corridor of Gallery 3’s exhibition space in February, March and April 2023. Join the artists and designers to celebrate the joint opening of their five new exhibitions. The pop-up shows are organised as part Het Nieuwe Instituut’s initiative to make museum space and support available to the wider field of art and design.

Join us for the launch of new publishing house Maas Lawrence as we celebrate the publication of its first book, Episodes: Powerhouse Company. The evening includes an introduction by Nanne de Ru and Hans Ibelings, and offers the chance to acquire your own copy over drinks. 

To mark the publication of his latest interview collection, Imagining the Future Museum: 21 Dialogues with Architects, cultural strategist András Szántó will lead a panel discussion featuring the architects Kunlé Adeyemi (NLÉ), Ma Yansong (MAD Architects) and Winy Maas (MVRDV). Together with Anne Kremers (director of the FENIX Museum of Migration), they will envisage the architecture of future museums. How will the art museum look and feel in five, 10 or 50 years' time?

Before the closing weekend of the exhibition Touch Me, To See Us, on display at MAMA Rotterdam, artist Giovanni Maisto Ferreira invites psychiatrist, educator and politician Glenn Hellberg to Het Nieuwe Instituut for a conversation about intimacy and healthy physical connection. Inspired by the idea of the uterus as a primary safe haven, Giovanni researches the importance and power of connection between human beings and physical communication and presents their personal exploration in the form of the exhibition and accompanying programme. This evening will be moderated by Zareb Hoeve.

As part of considering Het Nieuwe Instituut as a testing ground for an internet beyond platform capitalism, the Research team invites you to think along with speakers and participants, try out tools and ultimately work towards a lasting impact in autonomy across spaces.

What would you do if you were the boss of the museum? Become the director of the Nieuwe Instituut and shape the museum of the future: build models, design posters, explore the museum as a visitor or an employee, make music for the exhibition spaces and more! 

Het Nieuwe Instituut has been appointed Artistic Director of the fourth edition of the London Design Biennale, which takes place from 1 to 25 June 2023 at Somerset House. Led by its General and Artistic Director, Aric Chen, Het Nieuwe Instituut aims to experiment with the biennale’s format of national and territorial pavilions through the theme The Global Game: Remapping Collaborations.