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 from 15 - 22 February 2018 in different hotels in Amsterdam: Q-Factory Hotel Amsterdam, Clink, The Student Hotel, Andaz Hotel Prinsengracht and Hilton Double Tree. The hotel guests will get an idea of how they are viewed.

Check the results of this week here 

On February 12, 2019 a publication is presented at the Breitner Academy: the best portraits are published in a book made of postcards. Have a look here. 

Jan Hoek, 33, is a fine artist, photographer and writer. Much of the artist’s work reflects his abiding interest in 'the other', in the broadest sense of that term. The previous artists in residence at the Breitner Academy were art critic Terry Barrett, remix artist Eboman and visual artist Helmut Dick.