From January 2018, the visual artist, photographer and writer Jan Hoek will be the Breitner Academy’s Artist in Residence. He and all the academy’s students will study and document the relationship between residents and tourists over the course of a week in central Amsterdam.

Amsterdam gets so many tourists nowadays that local people have come to view them as an anonymous plague – but have they forgotten that each tourist is a unique individual with a personal reason for visiting the city? For the Me and the Tourist project, Jan Hoek and Breitner Academy students will probe preconceptions about tourists, and look for ways of reversing, flexing, confirming or exploring these stereotypes. The project forms part of the academy’s theme week around the subject of diversity.

From 29 January to 2 February, all 130 or so students at the Breitner Academy will go into the city and seek out new ways of portraying tourists using photography, video, drawing or performance. At the end of the week, the students will present the results at the academy, and the best works will be selected for exhibition in one or more hotels in the city – so hotel guests will get an idea of how they are viewed.

AIR
An Artist in Residence inspires students and teachers at the Amsterdam University of the Arts by confronting them with topical developments and issues from the arts practice. Innovation and connection are the main focus of these tailor-made AIR programmes, as well as the international and multidisciplinary context.