Public programme 2021

16 July 2021
Press information

Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts 
Public programme
17 July – 30 September 2021

Horizons of Possibility (Möglichkeitshorizonte)
Decentring Perspectives, Molecules, Strategies and Forms
Act 1

Over 260 international students will be joining the Salzburg International Summer Academy’s artistic course programme in 2021. The public art education programme invites reflection on a transformative time in exhibitions, films, performances, lectures and talks. 

Using concepts of commonality, coexistence and collectivity, the programme explores new forms of solidarity and connectedness beyond binaries such as nature/culture, subjectivity/objectivity or human/machine, analogue/digital. Based on queer feminist thinking and action, courses at the Academy seek to contribute to current conversations and practices that foreground structures of inequality through a focus on new materialisms, and political movements.

In recent years, increasingly visible artistic practices and related research paradigms propose that art is not so much a representation of social forms as it is the infrastructure of, and in, social practices.

The conversation programme Horizons of Possibility (Möglichkeitshorizonte) detours through queer feminist thought, engaged as a form of resistance; understands the collective appropriation of exhibitions and libraries as a strategy to multiply access to knowledge; and, in making public, its entanglement with planet Earth, investigates desire beyond normative structures.

Decentring Perspectives, Molecules, Strategies and Forms (Act 1) is a collaboration of Sophie Goltz (Director, Salzburg Summer Academy) and Marina Fokidis (curator, writer, founder, editor-in-chief South as a State of Mind magazine, Athen).

Public programme

1. Exhibitions

a) Leon Kahane Les Drancéens

Kunst im Traklhaus, Galerie
Opening: Saturday, 17 July 2021, 4-8 pm
Exhibition: 20 July–28 August 2021

Artist Leon Kahane creates conceptual video works, photographs and installations focusing on migration, identity and the confrontation with majorities and minorities in a globalised society. Again and again, he draws attention to events and institutions in which contradictions inherent in history are expressed.

Kunst im Traklhaus, Studio
Together with artist Fabian Bechtle, Leon Kahane founded the Forum for Democratic Culture and Contemporary Art in 2018. In research and publications, the Forum approaches the continuities of anti-Semitism and cultural pessimist world views. In an architectural intervention by artist Friedrich Rücker, the Forum presents its activities.

b) Rossella Biscotti Clara and other Specimens

Stadtgalerie Zwergelgarten
Opening: Saturday, 24 July 2021, 4-8 pm 
Exhibition: 26 July–30 September 2021

The artist explores suppressed and unspeakable events that shift global value systems. Her works tell of the alliances and of the resistances against institutionalised forms of despotism. Through sculpture, performance, and film, she weaves extracts from former life, forgotten ideas and traditional material into new stories. In the installations, spatial montage becomes a gesture of the material overlapping of history and present time.

The exhibition is accompanied by a publication with an essay by Tania Roy (Senior Lecturer, English Literature, National University, Singapore).

c) Die Sonne um Mitternacht schauen. 
33 years of Summer Academy print editions

Festung Hohensalzburg [Hohensalzburg Fortress]
Opening: 30 July 2021, 6-8 pm
Exhibition: 2 August –28 August 2021 

This exhibition marking the 20th anniversary of the Society of Friends shows a selection of the print editions and an extract from international artistic teaching history at the Summer Academy. The title Looking at the Sun at Midnight is taken from an edition by Katharina Sieverding who, in the 1970s, was one of the first artists to produce large-scale works. She directed 12 photography courses at the Summer Academy between 1995 and 2013.

2) Open Studios

30 July 2021, 4-8 pm, Hohensalzburg Fortress
13 August 2021, 4-8 pm, Hohensalzburg Fortress
14 August 2021, 10 am–2 pm, Kiefer quarry Fürstenbrunn
27 August 2021, 4-8 pm, Hohensalzburg Fortress

At the Open Studios, the teaching artists and their students from the art classes invite the public to take part in tours, film presentations, performances and conversations. Those interested can experience the unique atmosphere in the various art laboratories, in Hohensalzburg Fortress and in the Kiefer quarry in Fürstenbrunn.

Studio talks 

For the first time, the Open Studios include conversations with teachers, students and visitors in the individual classes.

3. Events  

Saturday, 17 July 2021, 4-8 pm – Traklhaus

Exhibition opening 

Leon Kahane Les Drancéens

[Exhibition: 20 July–28 August 2021]

Thursday, 22 July 2021, 7 pm – Traklhaus/Livestream*

Artist talk (DE)

Display as Dispositif 

Leon Kahane (artist, Berlin) and Verena Dengler (artist, Vienna)

Saturday, 24 July 2021, 4-8 pm – Stadtgalerie Zwergelgarten

Exhibition opening 

Rossella Biscotti Clara and other Specimens

[Exhibition: 26 July–30 September 2021]

Monday, 26 July 2021, 7pm – Traklhaus/Livestream*

Forum-Studio talk I (EN)

Reappraisal and Resistance of History: What to do with remembrance?

Eduard Freudmann (artist, lecturer, Vienna Academy of Fine Arts) and Sashi Turkhof (artist, President Jewish Austrian students, Vienna) with Leon Kahane (artist, Berlin)

Tuesday, 27 July 2021, 12 pm – Traklhaus/Livestream*

Forum-Studio talk II (DE)

Reappraisal and Resistance of History: What to do with remembrance?

Robert Obermair (historian, Salzburg coordinator for erinnern.at) with Fabian Bechtle (artist, Berlin)

Wednesday, 28 July 2021, 9 pm – Künstlerhaus

Sunset Cinema

Trinh T. Minh-ha, The Fourth Dimension, 2001 
Yasmine Kabir, The Last Rites, 2008 
Alia Syed, Panopticon Letter’s Missive I, 2012

Curated by Reetu Sattar (artist, Dhaka)

Thursday, 29 July 2021, 7 pm – Traklhaus/Livestream*

Artist talk (EN)

Geographies of In-Betweeness 

Flaka Haliti (artist, Munich/Priština) in conversation with Markus Miessen (architect, Berlin, professor Institute of Urban Renewal, University of Luxemburg)

Friday, 30 July 2021, 4-8 pm – Hohensalzburg Fortress

Open Studios, Classes of Louisa Elderton/Klaus Speidel, Flaka Haliti and Leon Kahane

6 pm Exhibition opening

Die Sonne um Mitternacht schauen. 33 years of Summer Academy print editions

Monday, 2 August 2021, 12 pm – Online

Curators’ talk (EN) 

Apart, We Are Together: Thinking about Exhibitions

Cosmin Costinas (Director Para Site, Hongkong, Artistic Director Kathmandu Triennale), Léuli Eshrāghi (artist, curator TarraWarra Biennial, Melbourne), Inti Guerrero (curator, Hong Kong/Manila, Episōdo 04/Yokohama Triennale), Shubigi Rao (artist, Singapore, curator Kochi Biennal), moderated by Sophie Goltz (Director Salzburg Summer Academy)

Thursday, 5 August 2021, 7 pm – Online

Lecture-performance (EN)

Annie Sprinkle (performance artist, San Francisco) and Beth Stephens (film maker, performance artist, San Francisco, professor at University of California, Santa Cruz)

In celebration of the publication Assuming the Ecosexual Position. The Earth as Lover (Minnesota, 2021)

Monday, 9 August 2021, 7 pm – Traklhaus/Livestream*

Artist talk (EN)

The Perpetual Constructing of Oneself

Anna Daučiková (artist, Prag) in conversation with Ana Hoffner (ex-Prvulovic*) (artist, Vienna, Professor, Artistic Research, Mozarteum Salzburg)

Friday, 13 August 2021, 4-8 pm – Hohensalzburg Fortress

Open Studios, Classes of Cosmin Costinaş/Inti Guerrero (online), Anna Daučiková, Ho Tzu Nyen with Jan Gerber/Sebastian Lütgert, Francis Ruyter, Shubigi Rao (online)

6 pm Studio talk with Ho Tzu Nyen (online) with Jan Gerber/Sebastian Lütgert (EN)

7 pm Studio talk with Francis Ruyter (DE/EN)

Saturday, 14 August 2021, 10am-2 pm – Kiefer quarry Fürstenbrunn, Grödig

Open Air Studio, Class of Cäcilia Brown/Anna Hofbauer/Mikkel Holm Torp

1 pm Studio talk (EN)

Monday, 16 August 2021, 7 pm – Traklhaus/Livestream*

Curators talk (EN) 

Documenta as a Common

ruangrupa (artist collective, Jakarta, Artistic Directors Documenta 15) and Adam Szymczyk (curator, Athens, Artistic Director Documenta 14) moderated by Nora Sternfeld (art educator, curator, Vienna, Professor of Art Education, Hamburg University of Fine Arts)

Wedesday, 18 August 2021, 7 pm – Stadtgalerie Zwergelgarten/Livestream*

Artist talk (EN)

Leaving Buru: Aesthetics of Ecology

Rossella Biscotti (artist, Brussels) in conversation with Sophie Goltz (Director Salzburg Summer Academy)

Friday, 20 August 2021, 7 pm – Online

Lecture (EN)

Unsetting the Universal: Really Useful Commoning

Dubravka Sekulić (architect, Senior Tutor, School of Architecture, Royal College of Art, London, UK)

Monday, 24 August 2021, 7 pm – Online

Lecture (EN)

Ewa Majewska (philosoph, activist, lecturer, University Warsaw, fellow ICI Berlin)

In celebration of the publication Feminist Antifacism: Counterpublics of the Common (London, 2021)

Friday, 27 August 2021, 4-8 pm – Hohensalzburg Fortress

Open Studios, Classes of Rossella Biscotti, Shezad Dawood (online), Christina Dimitriadis, Nadira Husain/Flora Klein, Christian Nyampeta (online)

6 pm – Studio talk with Christiana Dimitriadis (DE/EN)

7 pm – Studio talk with Nadira Husain/Flora Klein (DE/EN)

8 pm – Preview 2022+ with Till Gathmann (graphic designer) and Sophie Goltz (Director Salzburg Summer Academy)

General information

All events are open to the public and free of charge. Details of times and locations are available on our website www.summeracademy.at under the menu option Events.

Livestream under: www.youtube.com/user/summeracadoffinearts

Further details and photo material 

Simone Rudolph
Communications & assistant to the director
presse@summeracademy.at, +43 (0) 662 842 113 14