We are very proud that two artists who teach in Salzburg this summer will be official representatives of their home countries at the 56th Venice Biennale, open to the public from May 9: Tobias Zielony (German Pavilion) and Irina Nakhova (Russian Pavilion).

 “The Green Pavilion by Irina Nakhova is in dialogue with Ilya Kabakov’s Red Pavilion, built for the 45th Venice Biennale in 1993. In The Green Pavilion, Nakhova […] carries out its transformation by repainting the exterior in its original green, activating a signifying mechanism of color in each of the pavilion’s rooms. Inside, Nakhova unleashes the trans-painterly potential of color, demonstrating its ability to react to social and cultural transformations.” (press release Russian Pavilion)

Read here a current interview with Irina Nakhova in Russia Beyond The Headlines.

„Tobias Zielony’s documentary essay consists of photographs that he took of African refugees in Berlin and Hamburg. On the one hand, they form an autonomous photographic narrative, on the other, they are the subjects of articles that African authors have published in newspapers in the protagonists’ countries of origin – in Sudan, Cameroon, and Nigeria.“ (press release German Pavilion)

Tobias Zielony, Die Überfahrt (like real boat people. dislike maritime marketing), 2014, installation view, Lichtwark revisited, Hamburger Kunsthalle, photo: Tobias Zielony, courtesy the artist and KOW, Berlin

What is new this year?
Bernhard Cella, an artist who runs his own studio as a bookshop, offers students help in realising their own (part-)publications, from the idea right up to the finished product: a printed book. Taking current and historical examples, the students in this course will analyse various approaches and forms of production, including pictorial language, format and varieties of paper, text production, typography and typesetting techniques.

The architect group feld72 directs a course on the topic of art in public space; for the first time in the Summer Academy, this includes architectural, urbanistic and artistic considerations, methods and strategies, and will be carried out directly in Salzburg’s public space. Participants will look at specific phenomena of Salzburg's public space as a case study for the transformation of public space in general, analysing them on site. They will plan and realise their own works in various forms – interventions, installations, performances, etc.

Hurry up, send us your convincing portfolio and try to receive a grant to participate in one of the 21 courses. DEADLINE for grant application ENDS ON APRIL 8. Upload your application here.

The Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts is offering two courses in curatorial practice and theory with Joanna Warsza, recently head of the "public program" of Manifesta 10 in St. Petersburg, and Raimundas Malašauskas, who e.g. curated the Lithuanian and Cyprus Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013. After a very successful premiere last year, there will be two courses on "The art of writing and theory" with renowned author and art historian Jennifer Allen, who published hundreds of texts for a host of international publications, including Artforum, Mousse, frieze and frieze d/e (which she edited from 2011 to 2013).

On Thursday, March 19 at 7 p.m., Jennifer Allen holds a lecture on a "Portrait of the city as an artist. Post-Internet art in public" at Kunst-Werke in Berlin. Her latest article "Of drones and horses or the multiplication of moving perspectives" is published in the Feb/March issue of Mousse Magazine.

"Raimundas Malašauskas curates in the world, writes occasionally" is often said in his biography. Recently he has arrived in Liverpool, where he is part of the curatorial team of Liverpool Biennial in 2016. During a conversation with Francesco Manacorda in February this year, he presents former exhibitons he has curated, and talks about a few ideas for the upcoming Biennial.

In Conversation: Francesco Manacorda & Raimundas Malašauskas from Liverpool Biennial on Vimeo.

Within the conference-festival "Are you alive or not?", running March 18–22 at Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, Joanna Warzsa curates a one-day-series of lectures and screenings on the political theater and the idea of performance combining the drama, the visual arts, and political militancy.

The combination of text and image in comics, graphic novels or cartoons, provide a sophisticated device for narrating stories and for portraying the complexity of our society. While the two layers of text and image are interacting, they produce meanings that neither can achieve by itself. The summer academy offers two courses with two outstanding comic artists. While Ben Katchor focuses on worldwide traditions of illustration and comics in performance, Nicolas Wild imparts skills in creating graphic reportage.

Ben Katchor, detail from The Jew of New York

Currently, Ben Katchor is represented in the group exhibition Alt-Weekly Comics, the first museum retrospective dedicated to the comics of the alternative weekly newspaper world, running March 4 through May 2 at the Society of Illustrators in New York. Read here a recent reportage on Ben Katchor in the Jüdische Allgemeine (only in German).

Nicolas Wild, detail from Ainsi se tut Zarathoustra

Nicolas Wild currently participates in the Festival of Literature in Dubai. On March 6 he will discuss "Graphic Wonders" and on March 7 he will demonstrate "The Art of Graphic Novels". Recently, Nicolas Wild portrayed his colleague Chapatte within the series “square” on the French/German TV channel “arte”: