Rietveld Uncut is an annual exhibition and performance programme from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Its collaboration with Studium Generale Rietveld Academie culminates in a simultaneous conference week and exhibition in which ‘the making and the thinking’ come together. This year students created work in relation to the Studium Generale theme 'loVe making ᥫ᭡ love as a creative act and site of resistance'. See more on: rietvelduncut.rietveldacademie.nl
Find a visual overview of the exhibition below.
Photos by Matija Stojanovic.
Maren Weertman & Anja Aurand | TXT & Graphic Design
These words are to be read aloud
Offset-printed A2 sheets
This work reflects on exchanges between language, bodies, and space, approaching love as a set of relations subject to constant movement and change. The writing reflects on these multiple exchanges. These words are to be read aloud is a performative installation consisting of 2000 offset-printed sheets. You are invited to take a sheet with you and read the words aloud. The installation was activated by a performance on Friday 20 March as well as by smaller interventions taking place throughout the exhibition.
Thanks to Bookbinding workshop for the paper and César Rogers and Yuri Sato for the printing.
Performers: Salya Berraf, Domenik Naue and Ina Wojdyła
Flore Hoeneveld & Chaya Adelaars | DOGtime Expanded Painting & VAV – moving image
Onder de Kasseien, het Veen (Translates as: Under the Cobblestones, the Peat)
Oak wood
What lies beneath finds its way up, an insistent force that refuses to remain hidden.
Thanks to the workshop professionals who realised this project, Stadshout for the wood, and Gijs van Herwaarden.
Claire Vissac & evin | Jewellery – Linking Bodies
“The epidermis is a good guide to the boundary of embodied individuality. Where, however, is the skin of a collectivity?” – R.J.
Steel, silicone, hair, dust, fabric, used teabags and other materials
This project explores radical dynamics and forms of resistance that are specific to the human body. Cells organise themselves into networks to defend the integrity of the human body; individuals come together in communities, in “social bodies”, capable of acting collectively against injustice. An organised entanglement of unique bodies moving with such vigor; no resistance is isolated. The work thus becomes an organism, pulsating, and unstable it seeks to make visible when the community overflows, a moment that is once fragile powerful and human. The puissance of a community, unleashed, united and overflowing, as if in a trance, is capable of creation and destruction. Each distinct fragment contributes to the sinuous composition, forming multitudes of networks that oscillate to the cadence of humanity.
Thanks to the Metal Workshop, Richard Jenkins and the universe.
Disa Märta Sunnerstam | Photography
Folk(s)
Aquarelle on paper and sound piece
Disa Märta's work focuses on the war on culture in Sweden. It is an homage to and a celebration of what unites us, as well as a protest against using it to divide us. Her goal is to reclaim Nordic culture, which has been appropriated by right-wing extremists as their own symbol of “pure Swedish blood”. The folklore and symbolism of Scandinavia and the other cultures that have influenced Sweden are the inspiration for this painting. She has created a visual landscape in which we can express pride and love for one another, telling the story of a shared history free from hate, shame or fear.
Text co-written by Johanna Bergmark. Thanks to Olia Tavlaridou, Mostafa Aliyar, Olof Sundqvist and Suzana Stoka.
Elektra Tatalia-Aloupi | Architectural Design
The Hands that form(ed) you – MAPPING CARE
Publication
MAPPING CARE is a project that considers love not as something private, but as something we actively build together. Through a collection of stories, conversations, small rituals and everyday gestures gathered at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, the publication illustrates how care circulates among people, spaces and systems. It brings together voices from across the academy to demonstrate how love manifests as labour, attention, and mutual support. In this sense, love making becomes a creative act and a form of resistance against isolation, precarity, and forgetting how to care for one another.
The project questions institutionalised theories of care and community, placing them in relation to the reality of the actual, implemented acts of care present in our daily lives.
Estefanía Escalona | Fashion
A Sophic Fire as solid perfume
Mixed media arrangement
This material arrangement illustrates the result of the gesture of mixing two substances representing Venus (copper/attraction) and Mars (iron/action) in corresponding vessels. It shows their merging within a heart-shaped recipient as a solid perfume. In Western alchemical tradition, planetary principles were abstracted from mythology to study transformation. The sacred marriage of opposite forces is called 'coniunctio’. The 'coniunctio' of Venus and Mars generates the 'Sophic Fire': a transcendent, non-binary force. This fire embodies love not as mere sentiment, but as an active, fortified, and vital energy. It is a state born from the fusion of beauty and resistance – a primary means for staying alive.
Eva Wentzel | Fine Arts
Between us
Photographs, sound installation
In an ageing society, the increasingly common practice of ‘mantelzorg’, or informal caregiving, offers a complex example of love, moving between devotion and obligation. The labour of cooking, washing, improvising, consoling etc. frequently remains invisible. Becoming an informal caregiver is often not an active choice but can emerge gradually. One's positioning or role in a relationship is not necessarily fixed but part of an ongoing interaction that can shift and sometimes be reversed. Not only the need for care, but also the act of providing it can arise from dependency or exhaustion, and affection and capacity can turn into vulnerability.
This work is made in collaboration with Ilona Smit, Sangjun Lee and Menno de Vries.
Freja Oline Østergaard & Josefine Saietz | Ceramics & TXT
Mending the gap between us
Video
We are sewing treads through each other's ears. An act of creating, connecting, caring, and repairing. Feeling every movement, every breath, as we stitch, and pull the thread. A moment of presence, both bodily and emotional. Mending separations, individualism, and the gap between us. We move closer and closer, until we are bound together. Connected. Slowly we become one.
Thanks to Jeroen Vermandere and Feline Hjermind.
Heidi Wong & Abdulrahman Sufyan Taweel (Abood) | TXT
weaving resistance, upholding traditions
Textile installation
This textile project grows out of Heidi Wongs' friendship with Abood, a young Palestinian living in the Gaza Strip. Across distance and unstable communication, their relationship has become a practice of care and presence. The work reflects on the fragility of home and how it is continually upheld through emotional labour, memory, and imagination. Tatreez (Palestinian embroidery) patterns are translated into woven structures, carrying heritage across materials and borders. The project is accompanied by a publication featuring an interview with Abood, which aims to share his story.
Thank you to our translator, Imaan Musa.
Ivo Blackwoord | Graphic Design
love/typography open reading group
please come to
the long table in the atrium, close to the window
stedelijk museum
museumplein 10
1071 DJ amsterdam
at
10.30am each day
18 19 20 march 2026
for the love / typography open reading group.
thinking through emails, rock carving, and work poetry, as a group we will read and discuss texts concerning the everyday dissemination of typography and the love (or other latent messages) that might be contained within it. the group is open to all. no prior preparation is necessary.
Karl Emil Krebs Birkeland | designLAB
Man…
Mixed media
Man... is a work consisting of sculpture and video that comments on contemporary masculinity, love, the lack thereof, loneliness, and the radicalised beliefs that they can lead men to. Strangely familiar yet gory and repulsive, the metal sculptures each actively constrain a screen with its hooks and sharp tension points. Cold, rigid steel takes the form of creatures with their own agenda and malicious intent. Displayed on a phone, a tablet and a laptop, the video work deals with static, stubborn repetitiveness and misunderstood stoicism. Desensitised and sobbing in self-pity, the work shows the contours of men crackle under external and internal pressure.
Performer: Gustav Marcus Lauesen
Luca Berger & Marley Graamans I The Large Glass department & Jewellery – Linking Bodies
Friendship as a verb
Installation with hair of the makers, glass and zinc alloy
Cross, twist, cross, twist
Friendship can feel self-evident, yet it is made and maintained through actions. Practised, repeated, and slowly refined.
These actions are different for every friendship. Like a private language of verbs. Laid down together, they form a pattern, weaving people closer together. Word by word, gesture by gesture, thread by thread.
Not tied up and finished, but constantly knotting, changing and growing. Like any craft, this too requires maintenance. When it is neglected, it becomes tangled – not out of malice, but simply because nothing that lives can endure without care.
Cross, twist
Special thanks to Gon Homburg for teaching us the craft of bobbin lacemaking.
Marieke Verhulst | Fine Arts
Jansje Will Be Fine
Mixed media
In Jansje Will Be Fine love is explored through the lens of grief. After losing both her parents, Marieke was confronted with the discomfort and silence surrounding mourning. She realised how speaking and creating openly about loss is strongly discouraged.
The work conveys the intimate atmosphere of the bed during her mother's final month. It was a place where everyday conversations unfolded in close proximity to death. The sculptures extend this space, inviting viewers to enter the bed. They create a landscape shaped by absence, care and intimacy. Love as a creative act of remaking after rupture, thereby resisting its erasure or simplification.
Matija Stojanovic | Graphic Design
Bob
Analogue projection with audio
My friend Bob has just turned eighty. He has lived in Amsterdam for fifty-four years and I’ve known him for just under eight. Our conversations jump from his first boyfriend to today's Albert Heijn bonus box, from clandestine sex on Christopher St. in the sixties to some boy blowing up his Grindr as we speak. I’ve spent countless hours combing through Bob’s heaving bookshelves and their contents; the books, letters, and photos blending his personal history with that of the city, his stories bouncing between past love and future opportunity, his character remaining youthful as his body continues to age.
Thank you to Bob Newmark for the time we’ve spent together.
Rita Batievsky & Ahmet Dündar | Fine Arts
You May Now Kiss the Alien
Video
Ahmet and I are getting married. But our love isn't quite what it should be on paper. While our video is mostly about love, it is also about being – and not being – European, and about the legal authorities questioning the authenticity of our relationship. The suspicions surrounding unions of convenience have evolved into complex systems of control, hindering immigration and reducing love to a flat, bureaucratic affair. Under inspection, romance seems to best survive through the lens of fiction. This act reveals the fragile logic of the underlying conventions that fail to consider what is most essential and necessary: that which cannot be measured.
Credits: Ahmet Dündar (writer, camera, actor, editor), Rita Batievsky (writer, camera, actor, editor), Georgii Orlov (camera), Romain Smets (voice actor) and Daniel Koers (voice actor)
Shipo Chou | VAV – moving image
Mediocre Nobody
Installation / performance
If the act of holding limits the freedom to move, then why not accept the messiness of brokenness?
We all once carried dreams that felt weightless. But time has a way of turning those dreams into stones. I have forgotten the person I was when I arrived here, and I am still learning to live with the stranger I see in the mirror.
Am I an artist struggling to survive in an unfamiliar world, or just a foreign supermarket cashier chasing an indefensible dream? If one day everything you cherish becomes the burden you are forced to carry –would you still choose to hold on?
This work is about the erosion of the self. Time acts like a parasite, sucking out strength and courage and leaving only a hollow shell of mediocrity. A ghost who exists but no longer lives.
Special thanks to the VAV – moving image department.
Toyo Lee | Image & Language
Poetry is dirty and so are we — Rituals of Purification
Installation of old, heavy belongings prohibited in exhibition spaces; locker-room hooks and restaurant waiting buzzers in pockets
Encounters with one another occur through systems and representations of the world – yet those systems can never fully contain our consciousness. This liminality must be recognised, and meaning must be continually rediscovered within it. Love resides in that constant attempt.
Staci Bu Shea & Mira Thompson with Eelco van Hulsen, Giulia Sachs, Jessica Kuhn, Luzie Deter, Maryam Ghafouri, Matteo Rattini, Pieter Bas Bouwman, Sara Lipužič, Shauna Jin, Sophie Virta, Teodóra Róka, Toni Kritzer & Weixin Zha
A bed, a dream, a brick
Workshop and installation
This multi-sensory installation is the result of a series of workshops led by Staci Bu Shea and Mira Thompson. Together, they explored how the private and intimate place of the bed can also be a space in which we can contemplate our connection with the world beyond. Inspired by life generated from sleeping, dreaming, and illness, participants collaborated together to reflect on the materiality of subjectivity and the metaphysics of the bed. The bed is an intimate place – of course, for love-making – but mostly its role in the formation of inner life in relation to the object world.
Special thanks to artist Feline Hjermind, who collaborated with Mira Thompson to make short video essays.