Frank Mohr Institute

Join our inspirational community of artists and researchers - we are makers, creators and innovators!

The Frank Mohr Institute offers four distinct master programmes – Painting, MADtech (Media, Art, Design & Technology), iRAP (interRelational Art Practices), and MAPs (Materials in Artistic Practices)– all of which share outstanding teaching expertise, critical engagement with key ideas and themes, a strong emphasis on artistic research, and offer a high number of contact hours. The Institute is an exciting international community, where you can explore and realise your potential, develop your artistic practice, enjoy all manner of collaboration, and contribute to knowledge creation and commoning.

While each of the programmes has its own learning community and distinct focus, they also collaborate and share certain curriculum units as electives. We cultivate sensibility for current societal urgencies, such as cultural complexities, ecological sensitivity, dealing critically and playfully with digital technologies, and creating awareness for decoloniality and identity, with its intersecting foci such as gender, religion, and class. Connecting to the deeper layers and aspects of these themes, we believe that artists - through their ability to visualise and translate - enrich our community, question societal issues, and encourage us to view the world from different perspectives.

A semi open system and community of artistic searchers and researchers

A semi open system and community of artistic searchers and researchers

The Frank Mohr institute is a semi-open system that actively seeks and encourages interaction with various societal actors, the professional field and different audiences and stakeholders. We collaborate with the Hanze Research Center Art and Society, and the professorships Image in Context and Art and Sustainability, but also with many other organisations, art platforms and galleries.

We are a community of artists and researchers, that together, in ongoing conversation decide what should be at stake, here and now. We embrace Donna Harrawya’s encouraging buzzwords: “to sit with the trouble”. We challenge and support each other to deepen and broaden our pathways as a multiform, experimental, open-ended, vulnerable (re) search.

We explore new and challenging vocabularies. We have a lot of time/space for inviting other voices (guest lecturers, artists, activists), to share their concerns as researchers. We have the courage, the openness, the curiosity, the playfulness, to continuously shift our attention. Whilst at the same time cherishing our local rootedness and using this as an attempt to ground ourselves, not in some imagined, colonial ‘centre’, but in a diversity of margins, of the beaten track. There is room for every type of artistic practice, for sharing, developing in continuous conversation with people inside and outside our community. We want to connect on equal footing. We learn from each other based on trust and mutual respect. Even if you do not know exactly where you are heading yet. We like the adagium of Karen Barad ‘there is no objective knowledge, only encounters’.

This is how we broaden our horizons and will explore new, more complicated, more intimate, mutual interweavings of human and non-human, living and non-living agents that make up our world.

Or, as Paulo Freire would put it:

"Learning takes place, everywhere, where we acknowledge urgencies."