The Summer Academy awards a number of grants for participation in one of the 22 courses. Submit your application here by 8 April 2016.

Special features of this year are topical positions in painting (Varda Caivano, Melissa Gordon), sculpture and installation (Nora Schultz), as well as unusual and rarely-taught artistic techniques such as miniature painting (Imran Qureshi), ceramics as a sculptural medium (Aaron Angell) and stone sculpture (Andreas Lolis). Teachers from all over the world work together with students from over 50 countries in the creative atmosphere of Hohensalzburg Fortress – join us and be part of this!
See full details of the programme here.

Palestinian photographer Ahlam Shibli focuses, in a documentary aesthetic, on the contradictory implications of the notion of home. Her work deals with the loss of home and the fight against that loss, but also with restrictions and limitations that the idea of home imposes on individuals and communities marked by repressive identity politics. Ahlam Shibli will direct the two-week course The notion of subject matter from 18 to 30 July 2016.
Currently, until Sunday, ediciones originales present books and multiples by Ahlam Shibli at ARCO Madrid. Her work also is currently on view within the group exhibition Alive in the dead sea at Darat Al Funun in Amman.

Tex Rubinowitz is a multidisciplinary artist. Probably best know for his cartoons in newspapers and magazines like Falter, Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, Der Standard, Titanic, or Kurier, he also acts as musician in the band Mäuse, won the Bachmann-prize as writer and had a solo presentation in the Leopold museum in Vienna last year with his paintings about The Nul Pointers. In August he will direct a two-week painting course at the Summer Academy. Apply here!
If you happen to be in the Graz region, don’t miss his reading at the Kunshaus Weiz tomorrow, 24 Februar 2016 at 7.30 p.m. He will read from his new book Die Fliegen, to be published by rowohlt on 11 March 2016.

In this (already older) documentary, Tex Rubinowitz provides an informative insight into his working methods.

Award-winning Pakistani artist Imran Qureshi is known for his unique aesthetic which combines the motifs, symbolism and ornamental techniques of 16th- and 17th-century Mughal miniature painting with current issues and the formal language of contemporary abstract painting. For the first time, he will direct a three-week course in miniature painting at the Summer Academy.
For his first major London commission, Qureshi presents "Where the Shadows are so Deep", a series of exquisite miniature paintings, that opens in the Barbican/The Curve on 18 February. Still on view is his impressive solo presentation "Idea of Landscape" at Kunsten in Aalborg (DK), including two large site-specific works.

Last summer’s course directed by Nora Schultz was based on the metaphor of a terminal. In an interview with the blogger Rafael Dernbach, she elaborated on this metaphor and the working methods in her class: „The students move in the terminal and they produce in there. They perceive the three weeks of the academy as a continuous working with this inbetween space. How do you find materials? How do you get them here to this exclusive space at the Festung? All these difficulties are preconditions for the production. I also would like to see the entire course already as some kind of a happening or a performance, although there are no spectators. What does it mean to work in a place where you are stuck and have no fixed identity? What does it mean to work in a space that is hyper-real and a ‘junk space’ at the same time?
This year, Nora Schultz will direct a three-week course with focus on an expanded sculptural production, regarding the external world as a possible partner in a sculpture, with (and to) which it can configure expanded perspectives.

If you are in Berlin, you can see Nora Schultz’s work within the group show “Secret Surface” at Kunst-Werke, to be open this Saturday, 13 February, 5 p.m.

Watch here the video of a performance she did at Tate in 2014 followed by an interview with the curator Catherine Wood.