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.

Heritage lab DIG IT UP, emancipation knowledge centre Dona Daria and the Rotterdam City Archives have together organised Gerse Vrouwen, an exhibition about the women’s movement in Rotterdam. Also included in the exhibition, which can be seen in the gallery space of DIG IT UP, is a pop-up dispay that corresponds to the Feminist Design Strategies room in the Designing the Social exhibition currently on show at Het Nieuwe Institute.

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.

Join us on Sunday 5 December at 2pm for a free Sunday Stroll through the 1930s museum home Sonneveld House. Detour guide Laura Grimm will guide us through this unique house, which she will approach from her perspective as an artist. Come along and discover it through her eyes!

After a decade of inspiration, the New Material Award is coming to a close. On 7 December 2021, Het Nieuwe Instituut will host an online concluding event, looking back at ten years of the award and sharing ideas for the future. The event sees the launch of a publication featuring all the New Material Award projects, as well as the final episode of the New Material podcast.

During the fourth public gathering of Collecting Otherwise, the audience is invited to join the conversation as we softly close the first iteration Seen/Unseen and look forward to what the new year will bring.

The research project Submerged Heritage pivots around the Brokopondo water reservoir in Suriname, which was created to power the modern hunger for aluminium. Researchers Daphne Bakker, Miguel Peres dos Santos and Vincent van Velsen talk about the project on stage in Rotterdam, while Mimi Sheller delivers a remote lecture on her book Aluminum Dreams: The Making of Light Modernity.

Join us for a free Sunday Stroll on 12 December,at 2pm, when detour guide Maurik Stomps leads us through the Temporary House of Home exhibition. As a designer and artist whose work focuses on the public realm, Maurik explores the changing role of home with us. Come along for a different look at domesticity!

In this edition of Archive Explorations, we take a look at examples of the ‘blueprint experiment’ and discuss the cross-disciplinary relationships between design and artistic practice and photography then and now. With contributions by Susanna Brown, Carolin Lange, Harm te Velde and Hetty Berens. The evening will be moderated by Ellen Smit.

In the Significant Content event series, popular creators from various social media platforms talk about the artistry behind their work. This edition features two Instagram meme pages @this.and.a.blunt and @joan.of.arca.

Join us for a free Sunday Stroll on 19 December at 2pm, when detour guide Joëlle Hoogendoorn will show us around the 1930s museum home Sonneveld House. From her perspective as an artist and educator, she will focus on the house’s interior design, especially the use of colour, form and style. Come along and discover this unique home through her eyes!

Het Nieuwe Instituut will be the first European partner venue of The World Around annual summit, which takes place from 29 January to 5 February 2022. The third edition of the summit celebrates architecture and design’s now, near and next with an expanded week-long event. Featuring two international live venues, the event will be dedicated to sharing critical and cutting-edge new projects and conversations in the fields of contemporary architecture, design and culture. 

The Network of Archives for Design and Digital Culture (NADD) takes Amsterdam’s pioneering Digitale Stad (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. 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.