Renée Turner

Renée Turner, c.2014. Photo: Ojodepezfotografia.
Lives in	Rotterdam, Netherlands

Renée Turner is an artist and scholar based in Rotterdam.

After receiving her MFA from the University of Arizona, she moved to the Netherlands where she was an artist resident at the Rijksakademie. This was followed by two years as a researcher in the Theory Department at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht. She received a scholarship from the Institute of Creative Technology to pursue a second Master’s degree in Creative Writing and New Media from De Montfort University (Leicester, UK).

From 1996 until 2012, she collaborated with Riek Sijbring and Femke Snelting under the name De Geuzen: a foundation for multi-visual research. When they started they were influenced by their time together at the Jan van Eyck, where art, design and theory co-existed, and they were also fascinated by the emergence of the internet, the popular vernacular of the web and the DIY sharing culture that was made possible through networked connectivity. De Geuzen's practice took on a variety of forms and combined art, design, coding, theoretical enquiry, and ongoing dialogue with others. Next to national and international exhibitions at De Appel, Manifesta, and the Bienal de Valencia, De Geuzen’s work has been featured in Rhizome, Mute, and Thames and Hudson’s Internet Art.

Building on her collaborative practice Renée Turner continued to combine various visual forms of research with online writing to explore female identity, narratives of the archive, media ecologies and spaces of co-learning. She was awarded a ‘Start Up Grant’ from the Creative Industry Funds and a ‘Stipendium for Established Artists with Commissioner’ from the Mondriaan Foundation to work with the Castrum Peregrini Foundation. The project, The Warp and Weft of Memory, explores the wardrobe of Gisèle d’Ailly van Waterschoot van der Gracht and the ways in which it reflects her life, work, and various histories with the aim of forging connections to the present.

Simultaneous to these activities, over the past years she has taught art, design and theory at the BA and MA level at different institutions such as the Bergen National Academy of the Arts (Bergen, NO) and St. Joost Academy (Breda, NL). For several years she has worked at the Piet Zwart Institute, Willem de Kooning, Hogeschool Rotterdam. She was a Core Tutor in the MFA programme and later became the Course Director of the Master Media Design and Communication Course (2010-2011). From 2011-2015, she served as the Director of the Piet Zwart Institute, and currently hold the post of Senior Research Lecturer at the Willem de Kooning Academy. At the Master Education in Arts at the Piet Zwart Institute, she is a graduation supervisor where she focuses on higher art and design education; digital cultures & education; feminist/queer/critical pedagogies; political art and design practices; artistic research, community based practices, creative/expository writing. She is also a PhD supervisor at the for the PhDArts programme at the Royal Academy of Art (KABK) in The Hague. (2016)

Publications

• A selection of essays and publications

Interviews

• "A Cut and Paste Conversation: Renée Turner, the De Geuzen Foundation, and Jason E. Bowman", Variant 2:8, Summer 1999.

Links

• Website
• The Warp and Weft of Memory
• De Geuzen
• Profile on Piet Zwart Institute