Salzburg: We’re making our own Documenta!
Whether it’s a feminist shooting star, a “discourse bar”, a politically controversial photo exhibition or new buildings to be discovered – anyone who wants can follow along on a contemporary art course in Salzburg this summer.
It would be the summer of fine arts, actually. In Austria, at the time of the festival, it is all too easily forgotten. But the opening of the Venice Biennale was very early in the year this time. At the Documenta in Kassel and the Berlin Biennale, people no longer talk about art, but about what is politically possible in it, or what was nothing. And the Manifesta in Prishtina? Is far away.
Austria stays in and around Salzburg in summer. But even before 2024, the Salzkammergut with Bad Ischl as the EU Capital of Culture will reflect such lively curatorial will as that of Elisabeth Schweeger, you can carve out an art course here that is suitable for the Biennale. With all the contemporary ingredients that are needed today. And even with a little exotic beauty and pathos.
You have to walk at biennials
To make it easier to get started right away. Take the Museum der Moderne on Mönchsberg and the hyper-theatrical slow-motion paintings by US video artist Bill Viola. Certainly the strongest aesthetic statement in the current landscape of images in Salzburg. For some, it may be enough to be overwhelmed by the timelessness celebrated here, while others prefer to go further. Because biennials always mean going further – running, discovering, running, letting oneself be disappointed.
A shooting star of the international art crowd in recent years, and this is deliberately left in English, is exhibiting in its entirety for the first time in Austria at the Salzburger Kunstverein: Camille Henrot, born in Paris in 1978, painter, sculptor, video maker. With which she can equip any group exhibition herself, like “Mother Tongue” now.