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INVITATION
Rietveld Uncut 2020 – Relating (to) Colour – Revised

As the physical Rietveld Uncut exhibition in Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam could not proceed due to governments’ measures against Covid-19, participants created digital translations of their projects instead. 

“The students of the Rietveld Academie and the curators of Rietveld Uncut managed to quickly turn offline into online. We believe it is a great statement that, as a result, their work has nevertheless been given a platform. With current events, the medium shifts for once.”

– Rein Wolfs, director Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam

You are cordially invited to visit the revised, digital version of Rietveld Uncut 2020 at rietveldacademie.nl/rietvelduncut2020

For the fourth consecutive time, the Rietveld Uncut team has worked towards an exhibition at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, this year under the title Relating (to) Colour. Students investigated ‘colour’ from different perspectives and meanings.

Colour structures our daily life and our actions, our relationships with others and the spaces in which we live. Within different historical and cultural contexts, however, colours have very different symbolic, psychological, material, and socio-political meanings. 

Shortly before the installation of the exhibition and the Studium Generale conference week at the Stedelijk, the government’s measures to combat the coronavirus outbreak were released. As the physical exhibition and conference week could not proceed, participants created digital translations of their projects instead.                  

In total, 121 students worked on 28 departmental projects and individual proposals guided by (guest) teachers and Rietveld Uncut curators Tomas Adolfs & Tarja Szaraniec.

We are proud to present them here on our website and showcased on Vimeo. New video’s are uploaded daily.

Please see here the wonderful contribution of Minhwa Kang, second year student at the Jewellery-Linking Bodies Department.

The episode made with the sudden at-home quarantine of COVID-19 has disrupted the original rhythm of Yunting’s life, which yet leaves the still life extremely unreal. Family members are trapped in the limited
household space all day long regardless of the dawn or dusk. It supplies her a rare opportunity to re-examine the home life, care about getting along with family, and interact with surrounding things, and even her solitude in this private space.

When I am immersed in the catastrophic scene, my daily life turns into the most real practice of this alarming transformation which everyone is inevitable to be implicated in with divergent identities and perspectives. However, the family-based space where I live has always suffered from improper comprehension of this practice. What kind of anxiety tears apart my daily routine? Why does my mood change from panic to numbness, from chaos to denial when I face the epidemic? Why do I always frown upon the truth and deep discussions over problem nature in my space? Superficially, our interconnectivity with the outside lies in every network message; but in effect, the traditional connection in the daily order has been severed, leaving our perception of the outside subject to loneliness and uneasiness. Presumably, it is noted with more concern about the response to the daily mechanical and endless cycle of isolated survival than this epidemic crisis. With the beam through the dark, I submerge myself in the reality atmosphere with the only creative tool to have a glimpse of things that are always ignored in the daily routine. Via non-one-time exposure or return to visual world, I cast my desire and imagination for the exterior world and regular life in the environment I face. It denies the gradual disappearance and the distant relationship disguised in closeness, which always reminds me of the universal co-existence rather than universal non-existence.

By Yunting Zhang