Sonia Kazovsky Artist, researcher, dramaturg based in Amsterdam, NL.
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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
Playground treats play as a civic technology: a means to stage friction, dependency and shared responsibility inside a constructed world. Conceived for the Grabbehalle at K20, the work is a large-scale scenographic environment for collective rehearsal, housing Change and the Given, a collaborative narrative game that extends the installation into a framework for shared narration, political education and collective decision-making.
The work sits within the lineage of artist-commissioned playgrounds, drawing on Isamu Noguchi's approach to play as a civic and spatial practice; while repositioning the playground as a space of political formation. The museum is approached as a public site where access, participation and collective imagination are part of the infrastructure of the work itself.
Sculptor and maker Oded Rimon developed and fabricated the sculptural structures, giving material form to Playground's world. The work was produced in collaboration with Boris Kollar, Otakar Zwartjes and 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 developed as the participatory core of Playground. Conceived for young people and adults, and adapted by the Kunstsammlung educational department for children, it uses fiction, role-play and shared worldbuilding as methods for political education.
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, what it requires, and what forms of togetherness it demands. Play becomes a terrain where collective agency can be rehearsed, power made visible, and institutional life encountered in embodied and speculative ways.
Alongside its public sessions, Change and the Given has also developed through forms of institutional engagement: workshops, conversations and play sessions with people working inside the museum across different departments. These encounters treat the game as a method for thinking with the institution itself. Through role-play, fiction and structured decision-making, the game opens a temporary space in which participants can inhabit positions, test dependencies, encounter conflict, and reflect on the strangeness and difficulty of collective life; its formation and embodied realities.
The work continues a broader research into LARP, civic pedagogy, social dramaturgy and collective rehearsal, asking how games can function as political technologies for imagining and practising other forms of shared life.
From July onwards, game sessions can be booked through the education programme, with details to follow.
The Crisis Game – An Institutional Live Action Role Play or How To Navigate Across Different Positions
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 (2025–ongoing), 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, t 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
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
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
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.
Selected Publications, Exhibitions, Performances:
Power Play – Fighting for Dead and Non‑Existent Spirits (2019)
Sex Work Is Honest Work: A Preliminary Glossary (2021)
Lowell Re:Offering – Conjuring the Ghosts of Lowell (2024) – Distributed by Jessepresse.nl
Lowell Re:Offering– Trailer (2024)
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For contact or to request a full CV or portfolio:
info@soniakazovsky.com
