Series: Collecting
Collecting is a widespread cultural technique, both historically and today, shaped by highly diverse motivations and intentions. This series explores practices of collecting across time and contexts: in the humanities and sciences, in institutional settings, and within artistic practices. Collecting is not merely a gesture of appropriation, but also a practice of attribution, selection, and exclusion. How do historical cultures of collecting relate to contemporary practices? How do institutional frameworks compare to artistic ones? Which objects and materials are considered worthy of collection—and what narratives emerge from their assemblage? The gathering of things, pictures, or sounds—of materials or stories—follows a different logic in artistic practice than under the cultural and political imperatives of collecting and preserving for museums, archives, or libraries.
Through workshops and lectures, the series reflects on past and present modes of institutional collecting and display, as well as on collecting as an artistic method or strategy. It aims to articulate current approaches to the critical revision and reinterpretation of collecting practices and knowledge orders.
Past Events
Series: Beginning. Middle. End
Topic 2: Beginnings and Endings
Concept: Hildegard Fraueneder
This series explores the multifaceted questions of creativity—its relationship to tradition and innovation, and the dynamic between completion and process. These concerns affect modes of reception as well as qualitative shifts in modes of production: works that emerge from many sources, or are transformed through adaptation and collaborative continuation, blur the boundaries between what precedes or follows, between inside and outside, and thus destabilise the once-close link between “author” and “work”. And yet, an artistic work, a contemporary television series, a literary text, or a postdramatic theatre event—all begin at some point and end at some point, albeit in ways that resist the contours of clearly delineated, self-contained works. While every instance is marked by a concrete beginning or end, such thresholds can no longer be uncritically understood—within the context of openness, dissolution of boundaries, and collective practice—as aesthetic acts of sovereignty that simply draw a line.
This series opens space for reflecting on a variety of transitional zones: shifting conceptions of artistic subjectivity and practice; a movement of attention from form to content; and above all, on how we perceive—and shape—the world through and with the arts.
Past Events
Series: Science and Arts: Artes
Subject Area 3: Transitions between Art and Life
Concept: Werner Michler, Thomas Assinger (Dept. of German Studies)
In a loose sequence of smaller workshops and guest lectures, we attempt to profile the history of the concept and praxeology of the artes (artes liberales, artes hermeticae/magicae, artes mechanicae) from the Middle Ages to modern times. The focus is on the question of how the fields of knowledge that once part of the artes have diverged into the “autonomous” fields of “science” and “art.” The epistemological interest is thus not only historical, but lies in accounting for the losses associated with this process, which is usually understood as being responsible for the “success story” of the modern era. What disciplines, ideologies, practices, worldviews have taken on those subjects that were once considered neither scientific nor artistic? Are there chances of recovering a concept of “art” that could lead to a new formation of “arts” in the narrower as well as in the broader sense: ars vivendi/moriendi, art of education and art of healing (instead of a social-scientific or psychological pedagogy and a natural-scientific medicine), etc.?
Past Events
Series: Literacies
Topic 3: Transitions between Art and Life
Concept: Iris Laner, Werner Michler, Romana Sammern
This seminar series explores, among other things, transdisciplinary alternatives to dominant pedagogical discourses of competence, and brings scholarly and artistic perspectives into dialogue within the context of European educational debates.
With Hildegard Fraueneder (Dept. of Art Education, Mozarteum University, Figurations of Transition, Arts & Knowledges), Ulrike Greiner (School of Education, University of Salzburg), Iris Laner (Dept. of Art Education/SOMA, Mozarteum University), Werner Michler (Figurations of Transition, Arts & Knowledges/Dept. of German Studies, University of Salzburg), Markus Oppolzer (Dept. of English and American Studies, University of Salzburg), Romana Sammern, Figurations of Transition, Arts & Knowledges/Department of Art History, University of Salzburg), Birke Sturm (Dept. of Art Education, Mozarteum University).
Past Events
3. April 2025: Marion Thuswald (Wien): Kunstpädagogik meets Sexualpädagogik
23. Mai 2024: Spekulationen über das Klima der Künste: Gespräch mit Kris Decker und Barbara Preisig
24. Jänner 2022: Literature Literacy
5. November 2021: Visual Literacy mit Matthias Bruhn (Karlsruhe)
4. Oktober 2021: Begriffskritik
Series: Physiology
Topic 3: Transitions between Art and Life
Concept: Romana Sammern
This series explores visualisations of physiological constitution and their role in the production, transformation, and dissemination of knowledge—artistic, medical, natural-historical, or technological. Focusing on concrete bodily processes such as conception, birth, ageing, digestion, and dying, the series investigates how these processes are made visible and culturally legible, and how they contribute to changing epistemic frameworks.
