Written by Liska Brams, Angela Gurtsieva and Anastasia Katsman.

Finding an internship when you are an international student might be challenging in Amsterdam. With the help of the university, all three of us — Liska (Belgium), Anastasia (Canada) and Angela (Russia) — were lucky enough to not only get accepted to any internship, but to become part of the key media-art platform LIMA that aims to preserve, distribute and research media art.

Let us start from the beginning. We are currently pursuing master’s degrees in Contemporary Art History at the VU. In the beginning of the year, in September, we received an invitation to apply for an internship. Fortunately, all three of us got selected to be a part of this initiative. Our project is called Mediakunst op Wikipedia, and it is a nice collaboration between Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, LIMA and Dutch Wikipedia. This collaboration is made to spread information about Dutch or Netherlands-located media art online and to make this knowledge accessible all over the world. Our current duties include researching, working on Wikipedia pages, writing articles for LIMA’s blog, interviewing various artists and carrying out workshops for people who wish to contribute to our goal. 

So far, we have finished writing some artists’ biographies, interviewed well-known Dutch artist Jeroen Kooimans, visited the Stedelijk Museum library and underground archive where we are going to gather the information for the forthcoming workshops. 

This internship has allowed us to have hands-on experience working in art institutes such as LIMA and Stedelijk Museum. It has further expanded our ability to do research on artists and their artworks, which has been super helpful towards our master’s degree. For instance, two of us, Angela and Liska, are writing our theses about media artists and museum archives, correspondingly. Having the opportunity to work with fellow colleagues in our field has opened up a stream of possibilities. The collective atmosphere of this internship allows for our own personal growth in both academic and professional settings. Finally (and agreeably most importantly) this opportunity has granted us the pleasure of meeting some fantastic artists and media art experts! 

Overall, 👍🏻