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Me and the tourist

In January 2018, the visual artist, photographer and writer Jan Hoek was the Breitner Academy’s Artist in Residence. He and all the academy’s students studied and documented the relationship between residents and tourists over the course of a week in central Amsterdam.

On February 12, 2019 a publication was presented at the Breitner Academy: the best portraits are published in a book made of postcards. Have a look here

Amsterdam gets so many tourists nowadays that local people have come to view them as an anonymous plague – but have they forgotten that each tourist is a unique individual with a personal reason for visiting the city? For the Me and the Tourist project, Jan Hoek and Breitner Academy students probed preconceptions about tourists, and looked for ways of reversing, flexing, confirming or exploring these stereotypes. The project was part of the academy’s theme week around the subject of diversity.

From 29 January to 2 February, all 130 or so students at the Breitner Academy went into the city and seek out new ways of portraying tourists using photography, video, drawing or performance. At the end of the week, the students presented the results at the academy, and the best works were selected for exhibition from 15 - 22 February 2018 in different hotels in Amsterdam: Q-Factory Hotel Amsterdam, Clink, The Student Hotel, Andaz Hotel Prinsengracht and Hilton Double Tree. The hotel guests got an idea of how they are viewed.

Jan Hoek, 33, is a fine artist, photographer and writer. Much of the artist’s work reflects his abiding interest in 'the other', in the broadest sense of that term. The previous artists in residence at the Breitner Academy were art critic Terry Barrett, remix artist Eboman and visual artist Helmut Dick.

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Icon image: ahk.nl