Sonia Kazovsky Artist and researcher * social dramaturgy and pedagogy
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Current and Ongoing Work, Selected Projects, Institutional Collaborations:
Playground
Commissioned by K20 | Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf (2026)
Curated by Karen Archey and Isabelle Tondre
Sonia Kazovsky with Oded Rimon
Conceived for the Grabbehalle at K20, Playground is a large-scale scenographic playscape that invites children and their caregivers to climb, gather, imagine and inhabit a speculative landscape. Somewhere between science fiction and archaeology, the scenography evokes the image of a campsite in the desert. With an uncertain origin and by means of abstraction, these ambiguous images, carry the socio-political and environmental meanings of the contemporary moment. The work engages play as a civic technology and structured as a space for collective rehearsal. Playground is constructed as a provisional social space, where its symbolic landscape and props invite different forms of shared life to be expressed and (re)imagined. At its centre is Change and the Given, a collaborative role-playing game, or RPG, that extends this invitation into a framework for worldbuilding and collective inquiry, where social relations, shared resources and conditions of change can be tested through speculative fiction.
Playground thinks with the lineage of artist-commissioned playgrounds and draws on Isamu Noguchi’s approach to play as a civic and spatial practice. Noguchi's approach to public space and the playground after the destruction of the Second World War formed a proposition through the lens of repair. It asked: how might art and play in public space contribute to the reconstruction of social and civic ties that brutally severed post fascist violence. Expanding on this question in the contemporary moment, Playground approaches play as an entry point and the playground as a space of social and political formation. The museum is engaged as a public site where access, participation and collective imagination are part of the infrastructure of the work itself. Bringing a playground into the museum asks how an artwork might reorganise, even temporarily, the ways an institution is inhabited, used and understood. This extends to the museum’s operational conditions: contracts, protocols, safety, education and access are materials through which participation is shaped.
Sculptor and maker Oded Rimon developed and fabricated the sculptural and architectural structures giving material form to Playground's world and engineering its phenomenas. Boris Kollar designed a collection of more than thirty garments through the collaborative worldbuilding process. Together we have developed a propositional vocabulary for inhabiting Playground. The work was produced with the help of the craftsmanship of Otakar Zwartjes and graphic design of the game by Amir Avraham.
Playground opened April 25, 2026, and will remain on view until May 2027, unfolding throughout its duration.
More information can be found here. If you are interested in receiving occasional updates, writings and reflections as the project unfolds, please send a message to the contact at the bottom of the page.
Change and The Given
Collaborative fiction game, RPG methodology and political education framework.
Developed as part of Playground K20 | Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf (2026)
Change and The Given is a collaborative fiction game and RPG framework through which the wider narrative and conceptual world of Playground is collectively constructed and inhabited. Conceived for young people and adults, and also adapted by the Kunstsammlung educational department for children, it uses fiction, role-play and shared worldbuilding as methods for collective inquiry as political speculation.
The game understands the political as the lived process through which people make decisions, organise relations, distribute responsibility, and respond to conditions that are never entirely of their own choosing. Players enter a fictional place called The Given, where resources, dependencies, inherited structures and shadow arrangements are collectively mapped and negotiated. Through a sequence of narrated decisions, they test how change becomes possible when everything is interconnected and what forms of singularity or togetherness are possible. Play here is a terrain where collective and individual agency are scales of inquiry; power made visible, and social interdependent life encountered through the construction of speculative fiction.
Playing with/in the institution
Change and the Given has developed through workshops, conversations and play sessions with people working across different departments of the museum. Playing together was a way to explore what different forms of play might ask of the museum, including the infrastructural changes needed to support the participatory space of Playground. These encounters and workshops also opened questions about who the museum’s publics are, whom it wishes to reach and how.Through the game, we asked how we act within existing structures and what we might change together. Preparing the work became a way of examining its embeddedness in the museum and engaging with the institution’s operations from within. The conceptual questions of Playground, concerning inherited conditions, interdependency and collective agency, took form in the very process of bringing it into being.Playing with and within the institution was thus approached as a form of institutional inquiry.
The Crisis Game – An Institutional Live Action Role Play or How To Navigate Across Different Positions
Educational framework developed for and with the Student Council 2024/5 at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and Sandberg Instituut (in the role of coordinator and pedagogical advisor), collaborative film process (2025), Game kit (2025- ongoing)
The Crisis Game stages a fictional art academy in crisis. Players navigate the entanglements of forming collective agency under pressure — rehearsing responses to institutional breakdown, ethical impasses and systemic inertia, and testing what generative decision-making looks like when positions conflict and stakes are real.
Initiated through work with the Student Council at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and Sandberg Instituut, the game draws on emancipatory theatre, critical pedagogy and role-play to function as both a speculative framework and a reflective tool. The Crisis Game places players in positions that closely mirror their own institutional realities, making the distance between fiction and institution deliberately thin.
The Crisis Game Kit , designed by Sherine Salla and Anne-Julie Andersen, is built for use across educational and cultural settings. It includes role and assembly cards, veto tokens, stage-by-stage anchors for institutional worldbuilding, and four fictional crisis scripts — alongside an invitation for participants to write their own, expanding the game's capacity for situated reflection. The kit is designed to travel: to be taken up, adapted and facilitated beyond its original context.
If you are interested in the game kit or organising a play session, feel free to reach out.
A short trailer was made in collaboration with WET film collective, can be found alongside more information here.
Art and Governance
Student Representation Platform, Gerrit Rietveld Academie and Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam (2025- ongoing)
Art and Governance is a long-term institutional and pedagogical framework developed with students across the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and Sandberg Instituut. The platform approaches governance as an artistic, pedagogical and political practice, situating art education within questions of representation, collective authorship and institutional agency.
The ongoing collective labour, brings together student-led initiatives, collective study, public programming and an extracurricular trajectory around questions of Art and Governance. It treats the academy as a civic space in which forms of participation are practised. Through assemblies, workshops, shared writing and institutional dialogue, the platform asks how students can take part in shaping the conditions through which they study, organise and act together. Art and Governance extends an ongoing research into civic pedagogy, institutional roles, agency and participation.
More writing about working with groups, political education and participatory process coming soon.
Civic Pedagogies at the Jewellery–Linking Bodies department
In collaboration with Sonja Bäumel at the Jewellery-Linking Bodies department at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie (2022- ongoing)
Developing a sustained practice of relational education and civic pedagogies.
This ongoing research and practice, extends my broader commitment to emancipatory and political education attending to the ways such work takes form through infrastructural as much as curricular means. Some of the work is documented in Testing The Waters by CoE CI and available here.
An online version of the publication of our most recent project can be found here.
A new stage of the work took place in February 2026, expanding the course into a cross-departmental trajectory and in collaboration with Dynamo Amsterdam. You can read more about it here.
The Latijnse School as a witness - in a search for an unruly cosmology
Commissioned by Radboud University, Nijmegen in collaboration with POST – Platform for Contemporary Art and director Lieke Wouters and curator of public programme Martine van Lubeek (2025)
Staging the Latijnse School as a historical witness, the project invites local narratives and collective memory into dialogue with institutional history. First opened to the public during Nijmegen History Week in October 2025, the work unfolded across several months and reached completion in January 2026, when it became part of the university’s cultural collection.
For more info and opening times see here and here.
The Lowell Re:Offering - Conjuring the Ghosts of Lowell
Publication, installation, performative reading (2023–2024); Scenography and installation in collaboration with Oded Rimon; Performance and reading by Margo van de Linde; Design in collaboration with Daria Kiseleva; ISBN 978-90-9037587-8
Distributed by Jessepresse.nl ; Trailer Lowell Re:Offering (2024)
Lowell Re:Offering – Conjuring the Ghosts of Lowell takes as its starting point the digital archive of The Lowell Offering, a periodical produced between 1840 and 1845 by women factory workers in Lowell, Massachusetts.
Traditionally framed as a story of feminist triumph, their writings reveal something stranger and more contradictory: worlds saturated with theological imagination, apocalyptic longing, and the unresolved tensions of lives entangled in emergent capitalism, settler colonialism, and violent mechanisms of social reproduction.
The work moves across a poetic script, an apocalyptic newspaper, and a scenographic installation in which the archive becomes a site of haunting and collective address. The publication functions simultaneously as research, fiction, and historical refiguration presenting a methodology of critical fabulation, intersectional writing, citation, narration through footnotes and hautological tracing.
The installation expands this methodology into spatial form, staging a re-reading through nine monochrome prints, a mural mindmap, and a performative reading. The work proposes conjuring as a form of address: a way of inhabiting history that cannot be settled, where reform and abolition, emancipation and extraction, are revealed as inseparably bound, and history reverberates as an ongoing, protracted apocalypse.
Premiered at the Plantage Dok and later at the CBK Zuid-Oost, Amsterdam. Shown in further configurations at POST – Platform for Contemporary Art, Nijmegen with an apocalyptic library collected in collaboration with Lieke Wouters.
More information can be found here and here.
From the Archive:
Sex Work Is Honest Work: A Preliminary Glossary (2021)
Power Play – Fighting for Dead and Non‑Existent Spirits (2019)
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For contact or to request a full CV and portfolio:
info@soniakazovsky.com.
