Artistic Research
Week 2024

Ideas are restless entities. They morph, adapt, fade, and sometimes transform entirely. Much like human beings, ideas carry their own identity, history, and mark on the future. These graduates are conduits, channelling specific political contexts and locales through the lenses of fictional activism, reenactment, rituals of becoming, superimpositions, and speculative resistance. In doing so, they craft delicate, personal moments. Some ideas presented here are profoundly personal and intimate. Others draw from communal wells, tapping into societal or cinematic veins. But no matter their origin, each ‘idea’ wields the power to reshape our sense of self and beckon us towards worlds we yearn to inhabit.

“What kind of idea are you?” Salman Rushdie provocatively asks in ‘The Satanic Verses.’ He challenges us further: “Are you the kind that compromises, makes deals, accommodates itself to society, seeks out a niche to survive; or are you the cussed, bloody-minded, ramrod-backed type of damn fool notion that would rather break than bend with the breeze? – The kind that will almost certainly, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, be smashed to bits; but, the hundredth time will change the world.”

The research trajectories offered during Artistic Research Week reverberate with this very question. They are a mosaic of manifestations, forms, characters, opinions, and identities; essentially, they are a tapestry of ideas. These ideas have been tenderly explored, warmly embraced, fiercely defended, repeatedly challenged, and at times, hotly contested over these past two years. These graduates have ventured boldly into territories unknown, steering clear of echo chambers, and embracing the delicate nature of nascent ideas.

The Artistic Research Week, featuring an exhibition in Studio 1 at The Netherlands Film Academy and an extensive programme at the Eye Filmmuseum, showcases a display of research installations and film projects by recent graduates of the Master of Film. This exhibition and its presentations offer a window into the culmination of these research journeys and the foundational ideas that sparked them.

We hope that as you navigate the various ideas presented in this exhibition and its presentations, you will be inspired to weigh the question: “What kind of idea are you?”

Congratulations to graduates Emilio, Marlene, Mei, Malaz, Catharina, Tushar, Vatae, and Keren for their love of ideas.

Sabien Schütte produces the Artistic Research Week exhibition. The graduates’ research process has been guided with care by the core teachers Katarina Zdjelar, Diana Toucedo, and Eliane Bots. We thank the guest filmmakers, thinkers, advisors, examiners, and alumni who dared to come and play with us.