A Spotlight for the Helping Minds
Last night opened what has become a bit of a tradition already within the summeracademy - the so-called showroom. This is an exhibition concentrating on the artistic works of our teachers assistants at the Alte Saline in Hallein, this year happening for the 6th time and interestingly curated by our very own assistant to the head of the summer academy, Bärbel Hartje. As she said in her opening speech, thanking everyone involved and detailing the process "It has been great for me to get to know all these wonderful artists I didn't know of before, and to form a closer connection to Hallein."
The exhibition will be running until the 5th of August at the Galerie der KG Freiräume, Bürgerspitalplatz 1. The gallery is opened every Wednesday from 7pm to 9pm, additionally on Saturday, the 30th of July, from 10am to 1pm and on Friday, the 5th of August, from 10am to 6pm. So when you go to Hallein to see the presentation of the Hubert Scheibl class on the 30th, or for the Finissage on the 5th, why not take a look at this diverse, interesting exhibition? mp
Art is Everything
"I was always an immigrant, no matter where I went", says Milena Dragicevic, born in what was then Yugoslavia, currently teaching the class Meet the artist, find the image at the Alte saline Hallein and today holding a lunch talk about her work there. This was a very good position to create art from, she adds. "It's always about a way of surviving, of playing with contradictions, also of uniting them."
As she shows an overview of her recent and older works, it soon becomes apparent how involved the artist is with her pieces. They all stem from a deep, very individualistic process. For instance, one of her latest series of works, called Supplicants, are born from the photos of friends that she then begins to change and twist as she transforms them onto a canvas. "But", as she says herself "I don't deliberately push for the grotesque, the weird, it just comes to me and actually feels very natural." Asked if this process of transformation is just as natural, she concurs, saying it's actually very hard, albeit in words I, for the sake of correctness, dare not repeat here. She adds, smiling "It's also really amazing, though. The feeling of creating art is incredible. You can't be an artist for a few hours and then put it aside, it's your life." The audience seemed to agree. mp
Presenting Our Writer in Residence
After last years' Tanja Dückers, the summer academy is once again proud to welcome a writer in residence that will, over the next two weeks, accompany us, witness classes, be present at our events and in the end write a piece from this experience. The man in question is the austrian author Clemens Berger (http://www.clemensberger.at).
This Friday, he gave us a first introduction into his work, reading from his short story collection, playing a bit of an audio drama based on one of his earlier works and answering questions on hisconnection to art. When asked about his stay here and the text he is going to write, he says: " This is a completely new experience, to be invited to a place like this. So it's all very open."
Putting this with his previous statement that the things often just come to him when he writes without planning for them beforehand, I think we can indeed be curious on the outcome. Before that, it's possible to hear the author read from his latest work called Das Streichelinstitut (the cuddle institute) at the Künstlerhaus Salzburg on the 28th of July. mp
Art is a Process
There are those artists that conceive a project, do it in the hours, weeks or months it might need, and are then done with it. And then there are the ones whose art grows with them, sometimes over decades as they go back and alter things, add and fine-tune, their art an intimate reflection of their life and the journey they make through it. A very fine example of this is Senam Okudzeto, currently teaching the course "Conceptual Drawing" at fortress Hohensalzburg, who yesterday took the time to introduce us to her art.
Be it projects like the orange stands she initially discovered on a trip to Ghana, or the search for a new currency, she always starts from a very personal point, playing with her mixed heritage, looking for an identity. Sometimes she does so without even being aware of it at first, like in a series of works that combine childhood photos with bags universally associated with refugees and immigrants. The artist spent her childhood in Nigeria until at age 10 she was forced to leave the country with her little brother, leaving her arrested father behind. He later resurfaced, but "This episode was to be forgotten, not to be talked about. So I started working with the photos im my late 20ies and didn't even know what I was doing until a nigerian photograph visited my studio and filled me in on what had actually happened back then."says the artist.
The artist also started an NGO in Ghana called Art in Social Structures, or AISS (www.artinsocialstructures.org). This stemmed from wanting to do something with the revenue from her orange stands that had initially come from ghanan women, and the realisation that art was limited to the elites in Ghana, which she wanted to remedy. Thus AISS was born.
Mrs. Okudzeto will be speaking in depth about the organisation on the second day of the Global Art panel that will be held on the 29th and 30th of July. mp
The Word Created the Image Created the Word
At the opening of the exhibition "Sense and Sensibility" that will be shown at the Künstlerhaus Salzburg from the 21st of July to the 25th of September, the title, taken from a Jane austen novel, already foreshadowed what this exhibition is all about: The link between word and image. "But", as Hemma Schmutz, head of the Salzburger Kunstverein, pointed out in her opening speech, "it's not about the direct use of text in art but how literature inspires artists, and also about those gifted in both areas."
The group exhibition features contributions as diverse as floating eggs, videos of people reciting texts and a library of unread books. There is also a different kind of library, the open library thought up by artist duo Clegg & Guttmann, which is bascially an unsupervised concrete box inviting people to bring, but also to take books.
But why are we from the Summeracademy especially interested in this exhibition? Well, because one of our very own artists, Katrin Plavcak (seen below pointing at one of her works) is participating in the exhibition before she will be teaching the course "Three Paintings I wouldn't have done quite so fast" in August at the fortress Hohensalzburg.
We can take away from this evening that the doom of the written word that some publishers are seeing behind is far off judging by the numbers of people that enthusiastically studied the paintings, browsed the books and listened. Make sure to stop by the Künstlerhaus, and bring some time with you. mp
