Transgressing boundaries
“Transgressing boundaries” is the motto of the 2018 course programme. 18 courses – 17 in Hohensalzburg Fortress and one in the Kiefer quarry in Fürstenbrunn – take diverse approaches to topical questions of art production, encompassing all media and going beyond them. Thus students may make their way from painting to sound (song), from performance to installation, from photography to film and video, or they may concentrate entirely on stone sculpture or miniature painting, or combine a number of artistic approaches in explorations culminating in a shared polyphonic city walk.
If we look at today’s global social mélange, we see trends towards isolation everywhere – the national states in Europe from the EU, from the non-EU (Schengen) countries and from people who come from other parts of the world. We see this also in specific Gulf states, as in Saudi Arabia or Iran – countries that consider Islam as constitutive for their state, even if at present in some areas slight liberalising tendencies are perceptible. We notice these phenomena in the USA, Turkey, Russia, North Korea, also in Myanmar – the list is long. Here fences are built, there large groups of people are driven out because of their ethnicity or religion, or dissidents are simply locked up. The underlying conflicts, however, are motivated not only by ethnic, economic or religious considerations, but also by concerns including the effects of climate change, fairer distribution of resources, and many more. In some courses, this socio-political situation is addressed explicitly, in others viewed more metaphorically.