Thesis prizes Scriptiekunst 2018 awarded

The thesis prize is founded by the two research centres of the Faculty of Arts (Zuyd Hogeschool) to encourage students to make theses (and/or documentations of artistic processes) that do justice to their own artistic practice. Too often, reflection within arts education falls back on semi scientific ideals of validity and objectivity. This removes critical reflexivity from artistic practice. Sometimes artists fall back on the other extreme: an entirely subjective reflection with the inner world as the only point of reference. In between these unfortunate extremes, the research centres TDA and AOK support a wide diversity of theses, documentations, reflection and research within arts education that are relevant to artistic practice.

This year, we received 24 submissions for the thesis prize. Overall, the diversity in form and content of these theses is a real inspiration. Some of them are extremely well designed, some of them are maddeningly thorough, some look deeply at important issues, some are a nice-read or are great to expose on a coffee table. This diversity is what this contest is about. We hope that both our critical remarks as the winning theses are a welcoming inspiration for young artists.

This year, four thesis prizes are awarded (in alphabetical order):

Irini Birliba – Grafting Memory: The phenomenology of memory between space and individual

Feya Foppen – Het geschreven woord: een wonderbaarlijke onvolmaaktheid.

Sarah Gluschitz – Corpse in the Copse: human taphonomy and disarticulation of the skeleton in 2d and 3d for archaeological applications

Ayisha Siddiqi – Mijn Bollywood droom.

The awards were handed out during the Winter Nights Festival in Maastricht on 22 December 2018. The prize winners received an iPad with a value of around 550 euro. The two research centres also offer to publish the prize-winning theses as a book. This offers students a valuable experience of the publication process for their written work.

For more information about the prize and the jury report, see www.scriptiekunst.org.