Anne Fleckstein is new Director

Anne Fleckstein is new director of the renowned artist-in-residency program Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart. As of February 2024, she succeeds Elke aus dem Moore (2018–2022), and Jean-Baptiste Joly (1990–2018).

Since opening its doors in 1990, the Akademie has supported more than 1,750 fellows from over 120 countries and has thus become an important global network for the international art scene. By offering fellowships in the disciplines of architecture, visual arts, performing arts, design, literature, music/sound, time-based media, web-based media, humanities, social sciences and economy/economics, the program is highly transdisciplinary. Fellows and guests use the Akademie as an artistic incubator; a place to make lasting connections, and to realize projects that go beyond the realms of their own disciplines’ conventions. The Akademie is regarded as one of the world’s most important and innovative artist residencies .

Anne Fleckstein, born in 1976, was head of the TURN and TURN2 programs for artistic co-creation between Germany and African countries at the German Federal Cultural Foundation in Halle from 2015 until the end of 2023. Her prior appointments include Head of Press and Public Relations at the Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design Halle and various positions at the French Embassy and the Goethe-Institut. “I am delighted to join this unique institution, with which I have been professionally associated for many years,” says the new director. “For me, it is essential that Akademie Schloss Solitude is and remains one thing above all: A liberal, protected space for creative artists and researchers from all over the world that facilitates understanding, connection and dialogue.”

Arne Braun, State Secretary of the Ministry of Science, Research and the Arts of Baden-Wuerttemberg states “Anne Fleckstein is an excellent person to lead the Akademie. She sees herself as a facilitator who seeks to offer fellows from all over the world optimal working conditions. Her international network and her experience of contemporary artistic discourses, particularly those concerning the Global South, are extremely valuable. Anne Fleckstein advocates the close connection of the Akademie to the art scene, both in the state capital Stuttgart and across Baden-Wuerttemberg as a whole.”

Anne Fleckstein studied Cultural Studies, Modern German Literature and Cultural Management in Berlin and Lyon. She completed her doctorate at the Bauhaus University Weimar and the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle (Saale) on technologies of truth in the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. She has taught and published on knowledge practices and the decolonisation of epistemologies.