The group exhibition Garden State shows a selection of works that emphasize wild margins from our super-monitored surroundings and examine the ‘garden methodologies’ of contemporary control systems. The concept of the exhibition is inspired by the city of Rotterdam, its port, and its landscape engineering.
As a group, the works aspire to give a non-mainstream portrait of the urban cityscape. Garden State presents critical reflections on land use, reclamation, mapping, militarism and territory, urban growth, industrial technologies, and their repercussions on nature and ecosystems.
With: Marwa Arsanios, Felicity Hammond, Manjot Kaur, Esther Kokmeijer, Hilda Moucharrafieh, Katja Novitskova, Piet Oudolf, Bik Van der Pol, Amir Yatziv
Curated by Fadwa Naama

This three -part Study Group is part of the preparations for FIELDWORK International Summer School 2021. Learning, experimentation and discussion inspired by the structure and context of The Living Newspaper which ran in the USA from 1935 – 1939. With its roots in earlier European theatre models, the programmes that emerged were ambitious scripted productions which re-told and performed major stories of the day around housing, labour, disease and social stigma.

A Living Newspaper Study Group 1 with Dr Rania Karoula, March 27, 2021
A Living Newspaper Study Group 2 with Simon Bedwell, April 10, 2021
A Living Newspaper Study Group 3 with Liz Magic Laser, April 22, 2021

Speechless: Some Notes About Birds by Bik Van der Pol, in These Birds of Temptation, Intercalations 6, edited by Anna-Sophie Springer & Etienne Turpin, published by K.Verlag

In collaboration with TAAK and Public Art Amsterdam, Bik Van der Pol are developing Don't Fence Me In. This research project responds to the removal of a work by Peter Struycken from De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB) in Amsterdam, which has to make way to create a more transparent appearance of the building. The fencing to which the artwork is attached would become redundant, because of the relocation of the banknotes and gold-stock from DNB to Zeist. Bik Van der Pol's research focusses on (the illusion of) visible and invisible fences that give or deny access.

KW Institute for Contemporary Art and Sharjah Art Foundation, in collaboration with Goethe-Institut Marokko and ThinkArt, initiate a collaborative venture 2020–2022/23 revolving around the approach of The School of Casablanca—a school that developed innovative education and exhibition strategies in 1960s Morocco.
During a residency in Casablanca between 2020–2022/23, artists will conduct research, produce new work, and create a public program focused on the subject(s) addressed in their research.
With Céline Condorelli, Fatima-Zahra Lakrissa, Marion von Osten, Manuel Raeder, Bik Van der Pol, Abdeslam Ziou Ziou.

Hollandse Meesters
A New Bauhaus? The Debate for a More Inclusive Europe, by Hicham Khalidi en Rolando Vázquez
CENTRE PARRHÈSIA, The Society of the Friends...AND
16 Beaver Group
The Lab
Basic Income, webinars Akademie van Kunsten (in Dutch)
Naomi Klein in Intercept
SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM MEETS THE CORONAVIRUS SHOCK DOCTRINE
disobedient objects: everyday items that have been turned to a new purpose
TURN ON, TUNE IN, COP OUT By Steven Warwick, Texte Zur Kunst
Seth Siegelaub: The Artist’s Reserved Rights Transfer And Sale Agreement (1971)
Air Berlin Alexander Salon 47

The School of Missing Studies started in 2003 as a collective made-up of artists and architects, who recognized the missing as a matter of urgency in public space and how cultural education was so close yet so far removed from cultural production. They investigated what cultures laid the foundations for the loss that we are experiencing from modernization, and how we can learn from this loss. The School of Missing Studies is calling for a space to turn existing knowledge against itself to affect our capacity to see things otherwise, to trust that seeing, and to set our own pedagogical terms.

The School of Missing Studies is initiated by Bik Van der Pol, Srdjan Janovics Weiss and Sabine Von Fischer. In 2013-2015 it was temporarily recreated for programming at the Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam as a one-off, two year master Program. It also became the subject of the Sandberg Institutes first publication in this new cultural series, with essays by Liz Allan, Bik van der Pol, Charles Esche, E.C. Feiss, Laymert Garcia dos Santos, Sarah Pierce, Eloise Sweetman, Paulo Tavares, and Nato Thompson.
School of Missing Studies
School of Missing Studies, facebook
School of Missing Studies, Sandberg Institute
School of Missing Studies in Social Text Journal
The Lost Highway Expedition, 2006
The Lost Highway Expedition
Lost Highway Expedition Photobook
Conversation with Srdjan J. Weiss
blogspot by Srdjan J. Weiss and Katherine Carl
Teasing Minds
Ceci n’est pas une école d’art Catherine Somzé
School of Missing Studies at Lodgers. MuHKA and AIR Antwerpen

Now What?, Fieldwork International Summerschool, Hospitalfield, Arbroath, Scotland. 4-5 September online, 10am-2pm GMT
With curators Binna Choi, Galit Eilat, Tessa Giblin, and artists Ashanti Harris and Olivia Plender, and a screening of the film What is Democracy? by film-maker Astra Taylor. Programmed by Bik Van der Pol.

Take Part is a project by Bik Van der Pol, seeks to create a shared public vision of the city by anchoring discussions about its past, present and future, to the tangible: a 1000 square foot detailed wooden scale model of the city built in the late 1930s by the WPA under the New Deal program.
(due to coronacrisis the final stage of this project is postponed)
San Francisco model on David Rumsey's website
SFMOMA
Stories from the model city and 99percentinvisible
on Living New Deal
SF WAP model at Libraries

#GuessWhereSF Then and Now. Scale model sliding then and now images, part of the Take Part #GuessWhereSF Instagram series #takepartsf