MASieraad Degree Show 2023

Artist list

Yotam Bahat, Jana Brevick, Daniel Jirkovski, Meeree Lee, Jinzi Liu, Laila Marie Costa, Into Niilo, Ana Escobar Saadreva, Yifan Zhang

9 talented students from all corners of the world, from Eastern Europe and Israel to Asia, the United States, South America and Australia, will present graduation work that includes objects, installations and performance in addition to jewellery. Their diverse backgrounds and identities led to a creative melting pot in which fascinating ideas and concepts were explored. Questioning and exploring one's own identity is a reality for many of the students, but geopolitical and ecological issues also play a role in their work. While the relationship with the body and the human being is central to the work of all.
 
For Ana Escobar Saadreva, the Colombian student who ended up in Dubai after many wanderings and followed part of the program online, her identity is both porous and a daily reality. Identity, identification and representation are reflected in, among other things, poetic hand-carved stone objects inspired by data storage containers. 

Daniel Jirkovski researched his family history of Sudeten Germans in former Czechoslovakia. The marking of Sudeten Germans with an N, their exile and a genocide took place shortly after WWII ended in Czechoslovakia. Daniel brings this painful history out of oblivion by marking stones on site along a kind of pilgrimage. He transforms the N he cut out of the stones into wearable jewellery in the shape of a mirrored N. 

Yotam Bahat, as a result of the situation in his own country (Israel) and the cultural struggle flaring up internationally, made objects and jewellery that are at once antidotes and utopias. His symbolic human figures merge and expand, away from a separatist past. His objects and jewellery are visualizations and expressions of a utopian world where we can see the other as part of us and feel compassion.

Laila Marie Costa has made her neurodiversity and irrepressible collectiveness the subject of a project that focuses on jewellery, movement, sound and interaction with the body. The hoard, found, cleaned and sorted, became the subject of her work. Her bizarre jewellery and costumes appear to have been picked up straight off the street but, thanks to a continuous process of watching, testing and adapting, turn out to fit the body seamlessly. They generate sound and thus new stories.

Meeree Lee, who comes from a family of jewellers, extends the parure (the classic jewellery set of matching jewellery), with jewellery boxes. With the boxes, she aims to create space for subsequent additions to the jewellery set that transcend space and time and embody personal values.

The shovel as an extension of the body is Jana Brevick's theme. By recreating the shovel, she wants to highlight the experience of labor in a different way. When the shovel, a tool of drudgery, gives light, we gain a different relationship with it. Tools that are like rings around the fingers give rise to new movements of the hand.

Jinzi Liu's installation entices visitors into a poetic dream world. Think of the silence of the night, moonlight, fog, reflections on the water, and the fragile branches of a weeping willow bending over the water, the night slowly turning into day. Using these and other references, she creates an installation in which leaves turn into jewellery.

With her ambivalent jewellery collection, I have nothing to hide, Into Niilo moves into the realms of rebellion, dissidence, freedom and fear. Like a modern Robin Hood, she imagines in her Sabotage Repair Shop repairing precious jewellery, replacing the gems and charging the imitation stones with messages readable with UV light. The genuine gemstones are used to repair injustice.

With her Missing No 9, Yifan Zhang wants to activate visitors to participate in her project in which the concept of participation is used in a non-coercive way. In her poster, she connects all 9 participants, for which she uses elements from their projects. Visitors can further extend the exhibition by taking stickers from the poster, sticking them on their clothes and taking them out into the world.
 
MASieraad Hasselt-Amsterdam is a private initiative by Gijs Bakker, Ruudt Peters, Ted Noten and Liesbeth den Besten. Its aim is to provide an alternative to higher jewellery education in the Netherlands and internationally. After an initial successful start at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam, with the two-year Temporary Master Challenging Jewellery (2018-2020), MASieraad partnered with PXL-MAD in Hasselt. Since September 2021, MASieraad students have been working at the well-equipped brand-new campus in Hasselt, where they have access to many techniques, including 3d printing, laser cutting, textiles, glass, ceramics, film and printing techniques, as well as PXL-MAD's expertise in jewellery, techniques and gemology. In addition, students benefit from the extensive network of the MASieraad teaching team.
 
We question the small object; whether it wants to be small, whether it wants to be worn, whether it may be applied or whether it prefers to be viewed? 


Festive inauguration: Thursday, June 15, 7 – 10 PM.
Open during June 16-18 2023, from 12 to 20 PM.


MASieraad collaborates with:
Alena Alexandrova (theory), Aldo Bakker (graduation tutor), David Bielander (jury 2023), BLESS (head of Challenging Jewellery), Evelien Bracke (jury 2023), Monica Gaspar (partner teacher), Benjamin Lignel (guest lecturer), Estela Saez Vilanova (partner teacher), Kalkidan Hoex (partner teacher), Louise Schouwenberg (partner teacher), Ben van der Wal (theory, thesis supervision), Pravu Mazumdar (guest teacher).