Het Nieuwe Instituut

The Design Deck at Het Nieuwe Instituut turns visitors into digital designers. In Criss, Cross, Who Is It That I Wish I Was? you can design your own wondrous world and the creatures that live in it. Your design is scanned, bringing it to life on a bigger screen where it imitates the craziest movements you can come up with.

Photographer Amie Galbraith (UK), scenographer Karl Klomp (NL), artist and musician Gaika Tavares (UK) and artist and gardener Juha van 't Zelfde (NL) transform Gallery -1 of Het Nieuwe Instituut into a club for a few months. In their installation in the basement, they use various media to sketch a collective 'portrait' of club culture and the feeling of being one with the surroundings and each other. After a forced period without nightlife, visitors can (re)experience the togetherness and collective joy of music and dance.

Met hun multimediale installatie IF WALLS COULD TALK grijpen de kunstenaars, ontwerpers en programmamakers van (A)WAKE de derde editie van Home of Your Own aan voor een bespiegeling op het nieuwe maatschappelijke weefsel dat we tijdens de coronapandemie hebben geweven. Geïnspireerd door het gezegde dat ‘de muren op je af komen’, confronteert de installatie de bezoeker met behulp van virtual reality met dit nieuwe maatschappelijke weefsel. In de VR-ervaring maken bezoekers kennis met de zawiya (vrij te vertalen als ‘de hoek’), een term die in de Maghreb en West-Afrika wordt gebruikt voor een plek om conflicten binnen de gemeenschap te verzamelen en op te lossen.

In the exhibition Building the Visual Mind, artist, designer and filmmaker Donna Verheijden tells new stories using old materials from Het Nieuwe Instituut’s digital archive. 

Myvillages, an international artist collective which supports cultural production in rural areas, presents The Rural School of Economics in Gallery 3. In this exhibition, the inhabitants of three villages – two in Russian, one in Belarus – create photos, images and objects that reveal how they see and shape their environment.

This edition of Social Talks builds on the Housing Futures event organised by Het Nieuwe Instituut in January 2022 with the Independent School for the City. In the context of today’s housing crisis, guests discuss the future of alternative housing models. How will the squatters’ movement evolve, in what ways can we live cooperatively, and how do we preserve such spatial, social and political strategies for future generations?

As the planet faces a climate emergency, the need for progressive, global and interdisciplinary ideas to rethink and reimagine our world has never been more urgent. The World Around Summit, on 5 February 2022, invites visitors to meet contemporary architecture and design’s now, near and next, with invited speakers from all over the world speaking to their recent and under-construction projects in the field of spatial and environmental practice, examining cutting edge ideas, critical thinking and visionary new work, technology and research.

Speaker, academic and storyteller Aminata Cairo reads from her recently published book Holding Space, in which she explains her own approach to inclusion. As with the book, this presentation is an experience: with music, dance and words, Cairo involves everyone present in the joint pursuit of an equal space where everyone is valued.

The Network of Archives for Design and Digital Culture (NADD) takes Amsterdam’s pioneering De Digitale Stad (The Digital City) project, revisited in the exhibition Designing the Social, as a departure point for discussing the relevance of preserving digital culture. The evening will focus on questions surrounding the social dimensions of archiving in the field. Marleen Stikker (founder of Waag and De Digitale Stad) will tell something about the principles and ideals of De Digitale Stad, Tjarda de Haan (researcher and archivist) talks about excavating and unlocking De Digitale Stad, and Kees Teszelszky (conservator Digital Collections) presents examples from the XS4ALL homepage collection of the National Library of The Netherlands. The evening will be moderated by Katía Truijen.

Sea levels are rising. A rise of one metre would cause millions of people to lose their homes, fleeing the water as their land becomes uninhabitable. In this live edition of The One Minutes hosted by Het Nieuwe Instituut, we look at the sea through the eyes of young people from the Maldives, the novelist Alma Mathijsen, Maltese NGO Kinemastik, and many others.

In the second event in the Colonial Spectres series, researcher and filmmaker Janilda Bartolomeu talks to filmmaker and professor Sophia Siddique Harvey and film studies professor Rosalind Galt about the position of women in Indonesia during the Dutch occupation.