Stedelijk X Rietveld: Studium Generale

Events — 19 until Mar 21, 2025

Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and Gerrit Rietveld Academie present Radical Accessibility: Crip Pedagogies, Crip Theory, Crip Practice, a multi-day event featuring lectures, presentations, screenings, and performances by international artists, theorists, and Rietveld students. Part of the collaboration is the conference series Studium Generale, which this year explores disability justice and the accessibility of art through a ‘Crip’ perspective. The event culminates in a festive Friday Night. Find more information on the project here.

Price: Museumticket + €3,- (per day)
Rietveld students free of charge on presentation of student card on March 19, 20 & 21.
Location: Auditorium
Time: 19 until Mar 21, 1 pm until 5 pm
Main language: English
Admission: Tickets

Studium Generale 2024-25 explores the accessibility of art and cultural practices through a ‘Crip’ perspective. This approach emphasizes interdependency, mutual solidarity, and shared responsibility among our diverse bodies and minds. Once a term used negatively to describe people with disabilities, ‘Crip’ has been reclaimed by artists, activists, and scholars as a positive and empowering term, akin to ‘queer.’ It challenges harmful norms and prejudices and examines how disability intersects with gender, race, class, sexuality, and the environment, encouraging us to consider these connections on both personal and political levels.

Despite this, numerous barriers persist in our daily lives and learning environments. Many spaces remain inaccessible due to poor design and a lack of adequate accommodations and tools. Educational materials often marginalize or overlook diverse voices and bodyminds. By working with Crip artists, activists, and thinkers, we aim to reimagine the academy, our community, and our artistic practices through this Crip lens. How can we make accessibility a core aspect of our learning, thinking, and creating, rather than an afterthought or add-on?

PROGRAM

MARCH 19: The World is Our Corner: Neurodivergent Homelands and Landscapes

Guest curated by Hamja Ahsan, with Sarah Browne and Ipek Burçak

Hamja Ahsan envisions a transnational liberation movement and utopic homeland of Aspergistan—for neurodivergent, quiet people and introverts—within his book Shy Radicals: Antisystemic Politics of the Militant Introvert. His keynote will explore the expansive practice of Shy Radicals, which extends beyond the book through film, installation, zine archives, and, more broadly, as a decentralized curatorial culture.

He invites İpek Burçak, the first artist to bring the concept of Aspergistan and its coined terms into another space through her risograph book The Autistic Turn and accompanying multidisciplinary practice in sound, publishing, film, and performance.

Joining the conversation, artist Sarah Browne will present her film project Echo Bones: A Parallel Play, which reinterprets Samuel Beckett’s fiction by working with a community of adolescents diagnosed with autistism in Ireland.
These practices speculate on a shared future within real and imagined worldscapes, beyond the pathological, medical, and correctional.

Hamja Ahsan

Hamja Ahsan is a London-based artist, writer, curator, and activist. He is best known for the book "Shy Radicals: Antisystemic Politics of the Militant Introvert", which envisions a utopic homeland for quiet, awkward, and neurodiverse people. Based on the language and formats of liberation movements, he imagines a Black Panthers for introverts struggling against extrovert supremacy. His artwork "Aspergistan Referendum" won the Grand Prize at the 2019 Ljubljana Biennial. His transdisciplinary practice extends into social justice movements, mental health institutions, and Muslim diasporic spaces. He was shortlisted for the Liberty Human Rights Award for the "Free Talha" campaign in 2013, which opposed extradition and detention without trial under the War on Terror. He co-founded DIY Cultures, a festival of zines and creative activism, which ran from 2013 to 2017 in London, UK.

In 2019, he participated in Art & Protest: What’s There to Be Mad About?, curated by Dolly Sen at Bethlem Gallery, London. Recent group exhibitions include Documenta 15 (2022) with the Halal Fried Chicken project – which forms the basis for his forthcoming book Radical Chicken; Absenced (2024) at Malmö City Library, Sweden; The Possibility of Not Having Been: Seven Decolonial Interferences (2023) at Santa Mònica, Barcelona.

Ahsan is part of the editorial collective for "Asylum: The Radical Mental Health Magazine".

Sarah Browne

Sarah Browne is based in Ireland and concerned with spoken and unspoken, bodily experiences of knowledge, labour and justice. Her practice involves sculpture, film, performance and public projects, often in collaboration with others. Recent solo projects include Echo’s Bones (2022: a collaborative film-making project with autistic young people in North Dublin, responding to the work of Samuel Beckett) and Public feeling (2019: public art commission in South Dublin leisure centres). In 2020 she curated TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, Galway, with a project titled The Law is a White Dog. Significant group exhibitions include: Bergen Assembly: Actually, the Dead are Not Dead (2019) and the Liverpool Biennial, with Jesse Jones (2016). In 2009 Browne co-represented Ireland at the 53rd Venice Biennale with Gareth Kennedy and Kennedy Browne, their shared collaborative practice. She is associate artist with University College Dublin College of Social Sciences and Law.

Ipek Burçak

Ipek Burçak is a multidisciplinary artist, born in Istanbul and based in Berlin. She works with various media, such as video, sound, installation, performance and publishing. She is interested in forms of resistance, may they be archival or in present, and human or non-human. While examining the role of technologies within the neoliberal system, she searches for ruptures that allow other possible narratives. Her working process involves engaging with other people and histories and her approach is often speculative. She is the co-founder of the publishing collective Well Gedacht Publishing, where she publishes edited zines, pamphlets, artist zines and books.

MARCH 20: Unsettling Acces: Care, Touch and Institutional Change

Guest curated by unsettling Rietveld/Sandberg, with Carolina Calgaro, Grace Turtle & Romany Dear, CAConrad, Elio J. Caranza

Radical accessibility is not just about accommodating; it is about transforming. It is about rethinking how institutions function, how art is experienced, and how care can be embedded in the very fabric of our spaces and interactions. Institutions—including art spaces—have long been complicit in exclusion, separation, and harm. But what happens when we place care, embodied experience, and sensory engagement at the core of our practices?

Through readings, play, embodied experiences, and meditations, this afternoon disrupts, expands, breaks open, and reaches out.

unsettling is about shifting, challenging, and expanding the structures we inhabit. Through collaboration, confrontation, conversation, and complication, we work to support existing initiatives while opening up new spaces for voices, minds, and bodies that have been historically overlooked, silenced, or excluded. Our work is about making space—not just metaphorically, but tangibly, materially, structurally—for those who are here and those who are not (yet). Find more information here.

Carolina Calgaro

Carolina Calgaro (she/her) is researching and experimenting with alternative curatorial practices within institutions, which make use of notions of care, decoloniality, and disability to collectively (re)imagine the future of such hostile spaces.  She recently graduated from the Dual MA Curating Art and Cultures at the UvA and VU and worked as assistant curator at the Van Abbe museum. Her work includes the current collection presentation Dwarsverbanden and The Space Between Us.  In her free time, she crochets colorful creations as a practical way of dreaming and interrelating ever-changing possible outcomes.

Romany Dear

Romany Dear (she/they) is an interdisciplinary artist, performer, researcher and access worker. Romany defines her practice as a “spilling” - out and across diverse containers of access, arts, dance, education, and community organising at the edges of agriculture. Her spilling’s encompass speculative and critical performance practices, poems, planting beans and lots of time moving from and on the floor. Her work is grounded in dance as a practice of collective and social action, using “translation” as a method towards anti-ableist way of moving and of being moved. Romany has been an invited lecturer and facilitator at the Glasgow School of Art & The Royal Conservatoire of Performing Arts (Scotland), HZT (Berlin) and The National Universities of Bogota and Barranquilla (Colombia). She has over 12 years of experience working with integrated dance companies such as AXIS, Con-Cuerpos and Indepen-dance, and is one of the co-founders of Glasgow Open Dance School.. Romany has performed and worked internationally including with: La Compañía, Fundación Organizmo & La Casa de Meira (Colombia), Germinal (Bolivia), The Judson Church & The Movement Research Centre, (NYC), Galerie Wedding & The Volksbuhne Theatre (Berlin), Siobhan Davies Studies & The Swiss Church (London) and The CCA (Glasgow.) She has a MA in Interdisciplinary Live Arts, Crip Theory and Feminist Cartographies, (UNAL Colombia).

Grace Turtle

Grace Turtle (they/them) is a Colombian-Australian designer, artist, and re-searcher, intersecting AI, Strategic and Critical Design and Foresight from a mes-tiza, queer and transfeminist lens. They are a Marie-Curie PhD Fellow at TU Delft (DCODE Network, 2025), queering AI, ethics, aesthetics and politics in designing for co-predictive relations—using experimental approaches spanning perfor-mance, game design, simulation modelling, and worldbuilding to examine human AI, world-model entanglements. Previously, as Design Futures Lead at Deloitte Digital, they supported diverse organisations in leading transition and place-based initiatives. Their work has been featured internationally at the Porto Design Biennale, Telefonica Foundation Madrid, PRIMER New York, the World Futures Congress in Mexico City, and TEDx in Sydney.

Elio J Carranza

Elio J Carranza (they/them) is a transdisciplinary artist working with experimental moving image, techniques of play, text, and sculpture. In their practice, they synthesize material technologies, collective fiction storytelling, and image production software for the purpose of developing (play) ecologies that visualize and complexify queer, trans*feminist, crip, and more-than-human dissident intimacies. Furthermore, they are passionate about critical pedagogy and are invested in matters around autonomous healthcare. They work as a tutor in the Fine Arts Department at the Sandberg Instituut.

CAConrad

CAConrad has worked with the ancient technologies of poetry and ritual since 1975. Their latest book is Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return (Wave Books / UK Penguin 2024). They received the Ruth Lily Poetry Prize, a PEN Josephine Miles Award, a Creative Capital grant, a Pew Fellowship, and a Lambda Award. The Book of Frank is now available in 9 different languages. They exhibit poems as art objects with recent solo shows in Spain and Portugal, and their play The Obituary Show was made into a film in 2022 by the artist Augusto Cascales.

MARCH 21: Sexy Freaks

Guest curated by Johanna Hedva, with Tamara Antonijević, Nik Timková, and Zuzana Žabková, of the collective björnsonova

An afternoon of readings, discussion, and film screenings that languish in the themes of erotics, divinity, abjection, and monstrosity. With Tamara Antonijević, Nik Timková, and Zuzana Žabková, of the collective björnsonova.

Starting from their writing and choreographic practices, Johanna Hedva and björnsonova propose close readings of authors and artists who approach themes of embodiment and authorship as sites of loss, negativity, disjunction, and abjection. They will talk about consumption, intercourse with those beyond the grave, disfiguration, and oozing glands as formulations of the problem that a body is a site of resistance and its failures, but also where desire joyfully comes to rot. There is a distance to one’s own experience that they’re interested in and that the authors and artists they will focus on also explore. To approach the themes of dysfunctional bodies and ascetic, invisible, mystical erotics, they will watch an excerpt of the vampire movie Dark Angels, zooming in on the struggles of toothless vampires and perform a score for angelic sex after Ida Cradoock’s manual.

Within the discourse focused on self-healing and betterment, Hedva and björnsonova want to question how the ideas of the self, and their own desires of belonging, and being whole, maintain the systems that perpetuate the violence they are claiming to be against.

Johanna Hedva

Johanna Hedva is a Korean American writer, artist, and musician from Los Angeles. Hedva is the author of the essay collection, How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom, published in September 2024 by Hillman Grad Books. They are also the author of the novels Your Love Is Not Good (And Other Stories, 2023) and On Hell (Sator Press, 2018), as well as Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain (Sming Sming and Wolfman Books, 2020), a collection of poems, performances, and essays. Their artwork has been shown in Berlin at Gropius Bau and Haus der Kulturen der Welt; in Los Angeles at JOAN, HRLA, in the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time, and the LA Architecture and Design Museum; in London at TINA, Camden Arts Centre, and The Institute of Contemporary Arts; in New York City at Amant Foundation and Performance Space New York; in South Korea at Seoul Museum of Art and Gyeongnam Art Museum; the 14th Shanghai Biennial; Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Zürich; Modern Art Oxford; MASS MoCA; Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Bolzano; and in the Transmediale, Unsound, Rewire, and Creepy Teepee Festivals. Their albums are Black Moon Lilith in Pisces in the 4th House (2021) and The Sun and the Moon (2019). In 2024, they were a Disability Futures Fellow, funded by the Ford Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Tamara Antonijević

Tamara Antonijević writes and works as a dramaturg and artistic collaborator in performance, theater, and dance pieces. She studied Dramaturgy at the University of Arts in Belgrade, Serbia, and holds an MA from Institute of Applied Theater Studies in Giessen, Germany. The role of text in the collaborative process is in the focus of her interest and research. She teaches dramaturgy and co-hosts the MA program Live Art Forms at ADBK Nuremberg. She is a PhD candidate at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.

Zuzana Žabková

Zuzana Žabková is an artist, dancer, and choreographer who explores the body as a prophetic apparatus, always in touch with something beyond itself. In her work, she often starts from a place of wounds, weakness, and brokenness, embracing these as holy strategies for survival. She is interested in somatic fiction and collective play structures that serve as laboratories for imagining and training new forms of social relations. She works both independently and collaboratively, rethinking values around work and care. She is the co-founder of björnsonova, a platform, fictional character, community, and multifaceted dance form with roots and connections spanning various temporal, spatial, and artistic dimensions. Zuzana holds an MA from the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies in Gießen and is currently pursuing a PhD at the Faculty of Visual Arts in Brno. She lives and works between Frankfurt am Main and Prague.

Nik Timková

Nik Timková creates multimedia works that blend visual signs through a magical ritual process. Her installations often incorporate ready-made, graphic design, and textile elements, alongside digital collages that mix traditional witchcraft iconography with contemporary pop culture. Using Photoshop as her "magic wand," she merges digital and mythical worlds on ritualistic objects. Timková studied at Central Saint Martins in London and graduated from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. She won the Oskar Čepan Award in 2017, is a member of A.M. 180, and co-organizes Creepy Teepee. She also works as an assistant at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague.