Summer 2023 programme

This summer Salzburger Kunstverein presents new exhibitions by Tarik Kiswanson and Aideen Barry along with the film festival Sunset Kino.

Tarik Kiswanson: Afterwards
July 18–September 10
Great Hall

Tarik Kiswanson presents a multi-form installation of new work in the Great Hall. Forms of rootlessness, regeneration and renewal are combined in this project through poetic sculptural and architectural gestures, where we see postwar histories eliding with contemporaneous experience. Born in Halmstad, Sweden, in 1986, where his family came in exile from Palestine, Kiswanson’s practice has been described as evincing a poetics of métissage: a means of writing and surviving between multiple conditions and contexts. His artistic practice acts as a cosmology of related conceptual families, each exploring variations on themes like refraction, multiplication, disintegration, levitation, hybridity, and polyphony through their own distinct language. Tarik Kiswanson is a 2023 Nominee for the Marcel Duchamp Prize, who lives and works in Paris.

Kindly supported by the Institut français d’Autriche and the Swedish Embassy, Vienna.

Aideen Barry: The Song of the Bleeding Tree
July 18–September 10
Kabinett

Artist-in-residence for July 2023, the Irish artist Aideen Barry presents the installation The Song of the Bleeding Tree. Inspired by her ongoing research in the UCD Folk Archives, Barry references the Irish tradition of placing afterbirths on the roots of a hawthorn tree; the video portrays a tree bleeding and weeping, embodying the suffering of the earth and its inhabitants alike. This immersive artwork—projected onto the walls and floor of the Kabinett—is a scenography of strangeness and sorrow for our relations with the natural world, and an operatic expression set in the European capital of opera.

Kindly supported by Culture Ireland.

Artist talk
July 19, 11am
Séamus Kealy in conversation with Tarik Kiswanson and Aideen Barry.

Sunset Kino: Smithereens
July 19–August 16
Founded by Séamus Kealy, Sunset Kino is Austria’s only outdoor avant-garde film programme. This year’s theme, Smithereens, that is, small broken pieces, fragments, or bits, focuses on short films arranged together in fragments, as well as styles of filmmaking or art practice that works with collage, fragmentation, or stop-action camera.

Films by Aideen Barry
July 19, 9pm
Programmed by Séamus Kealy.

Smidiríní
July 26, 9pm
Programmed by Aideen Barry.

Architecture of Remembrance: The Monuments of Bogdan Bogdanović
August 2, 9pm
Programmed by Stanislava Pinchuk.
Followed by a reading of a previously untranslated excerpt from Bogdanović’s highly unusual diary, written in the time of his exile. After that a Q&A will be held with Stanislava Pinchuk and Maximilian Lehner, associate curator at the Salzburg International Summer Academy. In collaboration with Salzburg International Summer Academy.

John Heartfield: Fotomonteur
August 9, 9pm
Programmed by Hans Winkler.
In collaboration with the exhibition project “DADA is BIG: John Heartfield in Salzburg.”

Shubigi Rao: Talking Leaves
August 16, 9pm
Introduction by Sophie Goltz, director of the Salzburg International Summer Academy. Followed by a Q&A with Shubigi Rao and Sophie Goltz. In collaboration with Salzburg International Summer Academy.

All Salzburger Kunstverein exhibitions through November 2023 are programmed by Séamus Kealy, who has directed Salzburger Kunstverein from January 2014 until March 2023, and who is now Executive Director of Oakville Galleries in Canada. From July 2023, the new Salzburger Kunstverein director is Mirela Baciak.

About Salzburger Kunstverein
Salzburger Kunstverein, founded in 1844, is one of Austria’s oldest and most prestigious art associations for contemporary art. Salzburger Kunstverein facilitates exhibitions and projects by artists that shape today’s art discourse and creates access for a range of audiences to art and its debates.