We are very happy and honored that Clare Butcher has accepted the role of Head of Department for Image & Language.
Career
Clare (Harare, Zimbabwe) was trained as an artist, curator, and art educator in the School of Missing Studies, Sandberg Instituut, at the MA in Curating the Archive from the University of Cape Town, Cape Town; and the De Appel Curatorial Program, Amsterdam.
In her practice Clare organizes exhibitions, collaborations and educational programmes, such as Buhlebezwe Siwani’s ulwela amaza, ROZENSTRAAT (2024-5); with the Toronto Biennial of Art (2019-21); and aneducation, documenta 14 (2016-7).
She has taught at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie; BEAR Fine Arts, ArtEZ; the Piet Zwart Institute’s Master of Education in Art, Rotterdam; and the University of Cape Town. Together with Judith Leysner, Clare was a founding member of Unsettling at Gerrit Rietveld Academie.
Clare cooks as well as writes and edits. Some recent publications include We Contain Multitudes: Expanding Spaces and Forms of Mentorship within Art Education and Practices, ArtEZ Press (2023); and ‘Taking A Seat: Curating spaces of (un)learning and navigating institutional constraints’, with Amy Halliday and Helina Metaferia, Journal of Arts & Communities (2023).
Image & Language department
Rietveld Academie looks forward to this new chapter for Image & Language, a department where we understand language as material, instrument and construct. Image & Language is a unique place for versatile and curious makers that want to explore how to work with narratives and how these can take non-linguistic shapes. The definition of language is questioned, how much of a word is in fact an image (and vice versa). Students explore what happens when language is mixed in with other media.
We are excited about the vision Clare Butcher brings to the development of the department and we look forward to the next steps.