Dear students, alumni, friends, and colleagues of the Jewellery – Linking Bodies department,
After a regenerative May break, we are back with our next Tuesday afternoon lecture, this time with Dominik Cunningham.
Dominik is currently an Artist in Residence at the Francoise van den Bosch foundation , and we are happy to collaborate yet again, inviting their resident to share their practice with our community.
Dominik will give a lecture titled: Making present an absence: analyzing death through a personal queer perspective, about this lecture he writes:
In this lecture I would like to contextualize the journey of exploration present in my new body of work – showcasing the multiple vantage points from which I have considered the point, in which my personal ideas of death and queerness inform each other. Queerness and my personal ideas on death seem to exemplify my sense of existential self. My material experience and understanding of the world are fundamentally tied to the connection I have to my queerness and my relationship with my own mortality.
I recalled moments in my life, such as the first family holiday after my mother’s death in which I sat on a beach and read the teachings of the Buddha. That moment and a subsequent visit to a Buddhist temple were seminal in my imagining of death. It is moments such as this that have been coupled with research into David Wojnarowicz’s work, particularly his memoir of disintegration “Close to the Knives”, which allows for me to synthesize my work into an assemblage of considered objects. Imbuing within them my personal perspective, which hopefully aligns itself to others of similar thought. Circumstance has been a guiding force, in relation to reference points as well as the materiality of the pieces – which is why I have intentionally allowed myself to be guided by my intuition in the process of creating this work. The work is fundamentally the representation of a journey that has taken many years to cultivate.
Bio:
Dominik Cunningham (1998) is currently based in San Antonio, Texas, U.S.A. He received his BA in Jewelry Design from Central Saint Martins in London, U.K. He has won a series of awards during his time at Central Saint Martins including the Theo Fennell Award for Best Design(2022), the Swarovski Foundation Scholarship(2022), and the Marzee Graduate Prize(2022). In 2023 he exhibited work at Munich Jewelry Week with Vitsœ. A piece from his graduate collection is held in the Marzee permanent Collection. Recently he has finished his collaboration with Current Obsession in their talent accelerator program GemZ. This collaboration culminated in an exhibition at the Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam. This summer he will be creating a new body of work at the Francoise van den Bosch Foundation Artist Residency. He is also working on a solo exhibition as well as several other group exhibitions for the upcoming year.
We look forward to welcome Dominik Cunningham
Tuesday 14.5.2024
14:30-16:00
FedLev Auditorium
Gerrit Rietveld Academie
Fred. Roeskestraat 961076 ED Amsterdam
We look forward to having you with us next Tuesday, if you can not make it, you can join online via https://stream.rietveldacademie.nl/ .
Warm wishes,
Jewellery- Linking Bodies