Kunsthuis SYB

The slowness, the patience, the receptiveness, the stagnation. Certainly not starting positions where you think: it’s gonna happen now! No, silence prevails; we wait in expectation, in limbo. Passivity opens a world that we’d rather not see. We prefer a world of action: achieving goals, making statements. Bam, bam, bam! Why do we actually view passivity as something […]

From outside the SYB house, when looking in through the window, a projection shows hand gestures and a face gesticulating. When entering the space it takes time to decipher the video of Rosie Heinrich (UK) who speaks backwards, on a video that is played forwards. The artists’ facial features are accentuated in their muscular presence, […]

Listen online to the first SYB ON AIR podcast on Zomaar Radio

This autumn, Kunsthuis SYB presents the second edition of the triennial festival of visual arts: the Triennial of Beetsterzwaag. During the four days of the festival you may choose between viewing art, or live performances, participating in activities, listening to seminars, meeting artists, or just meandering through our historic locations while enjoying fantastic food and […]

It is hard to imagine a greater contrast than between the bustling metropolis of London and the quiet and quaint Frisian village of Beetsterzwaag. In 2017, Kunsthuis SYB began its first collaboration with King’s College in London, one of the oldest universities in the United Kingdom. It presented a unique opportunity for the participating artists […]

We construct our reality by telling stories. And when faced with something that is inconsistent with our story, we most often find ways to reframe it, construe it to our convenience, or dismiss it. ‘Alternative facts,’ so to speak. But sometimes events take place that differ so profoundly from what we have told ourselves that our […]

In 2016, the Young Academy and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) joined forces to initiate digital platform Mingler. Mingler is a platform that, similar to a dating site, compares profiles of artists and scientists through a matrix of algorithms in order to “match” experts from different disciplines. The goal of Mingler […]

We started 2018 with a partly renewed Programming Committee. The old committee recently saw three seats vacated: Tom Kok, Timmy van Zoelen and Vincent van Velsen left SYB in December. Starting 2018, current members Noor Nuyten, Erica van Loon and Agnes Winter will be joined by the new members Manus Groenen, Sara Bjarland and Niels […]

SYB staat open voor kunstenaars die diepgravend artistiek onderzoek willen doen om een nieuwe stap te zetten in de ontwikkeling van hun werk. Daarnaast zoeken wij kunstenaars die projecten gericht op de participatie van het dorp en de regio willen opzetten.

With three projects that walk the line between art and science, Kunsthuis SYB and the Minerva Art Academy’s Frank Mohr Institute collaborate with The Young Academy and the Society of Arts in exploring the virtual platform Mingler: a recently launched matching website for artists and scientists. While they are often mentioned in the same breath, […]

Yes we Kant! is the overall working title for Hester Reeve’s new series of artworks influenced by the study of Immanuel Kant’s ‘Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals’ under Dr John Callanan, Kings College, London. Reeve has become particularly motivated by the fertile paradoxes in the deeper weave of Kant’s rigorous account of the human creature’s […]

Attending Christopher Hamilton’s lecture series The Search For Meaning has broadened my understanding of the varied complexities of the human condition, which in turn has enriched my practice. Hamilton’s methodology for questioning the human state interweaves literature—which ‘is far more content to open up, display and explore the surd aspects of human life without then […]

King’s College Centre for Philosophy and Visual Arts (CPVA) en Kunsthuis SYB kondigen met trots de continuering van hun samenwerking in 2018 aan en nodigen kunstenaars uit een voorstel in te dienen voor hun tweede gezamenlijke residency programma!

International cross-fertilisation between philosophy, theory and the visual arts: the new Centre for Philosophy and the Visual Arts in London brings together artists and philosophers. When it comes to art education, London has an excellent reputation. Goldsmiths, Slade School of Art, the Royal College, the Royal Academy, Wimbledon, Chelsea, Central Saint Martins: each renowned institutes […]

In ‘Enough Rumours to Swing A Cat’ visual artist Alison Yip rewrites small town stories into absurd anecdotes and wallpaintings. She spent one month introducing local Frysian histories to Kunsthuis SYB by talking to neighbours, drawing up patterns and transscribing tales. Gossip is known for growing in its notoriety by losing truthful detail as it gets passed along. In the process, vacuums give way to all sorts of phantasms. […]

Julia Geerlings and Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk are curating the Second Triennial of Beetsterzwaag

In the Atlantic period (8000 – 5000 B.C.) the territories of Friesland, Groningen and Drenthe still largely comprised of wetland. In this vast, soggy marshland, oxygen and bacteria were barely given the chance to consume the remains of dead plants. Over thousands of years, layers of metres-deep peat were created from the dead plant material, a fossil fuel source […]

A man sits next to a sculpture. He’s playing the cello. It’s Saturday afternoon and visitors of the exhibition The City as Canvas uncomfortably form a circle around the man and the sculpture. A female dancer appears from the stairwell. She links the visitors together one by one, placing hesitant hands on strange shoulders. The […]

Alison Yip works primarily through painting, wall treatments and everyday materials, engaging various genres and styles of visual representation. She examines notions of containment and absorption as it is negotiated pictorially and as a subject matter in itself as a process that takes place cognitively, but also within such ‘containers’ as a painting or architecture. […]

Kunsthuis SYB is participating in Playtime, the eleventh Kunstvlaai festival this year with new work (a performative interaction) by Milena Naef, winner of the 7th Sybren Hellinga Kunstprijs 2016. Playtime From May 20 through 22 over twenty project spaces from the Netherlands and abroad will experiment with an elastic exhibition concept at the SSBA Salon, […]