Our new curator Pauline Hatzigeorgiou will present her curatorial framework on Wednesday, 21 May 2025 at 6 p.m. at Kapitel Bollwerk/in transformation in Bern, as part of the GK zu Gast talks. You are very welcome to join!
Pauline Hatzigeorgiou has invited three guests, Nika Dubrovsky, Niloufar Emamifar, and Georgia Sagri, and Bern Academy of the Arts HKB Alumna, Karen Amanda Moser, to work on a tightly curated set of questions in Bern from 4–8 August 2025.
During this first meeting, they will be designing a workshop programme that will be taking place from 10–14 November 2025 at the HKB for students of the Master programme of the Contemporary Art Practices (CAP), and the Bachelor students of Art Education and Fine Arts of the HKB.
During this November week, there will be a second public event where Pauline Hatzigeorgiou will reflect on the group’s work (date & time tba).
We are excited to announce our new curator for the SPK cycle 2025!
Pauline Hatzigeorgiou is an art historian and curator based in Brussels. Her work often engages with the economic conditions that shape artistic production, with a focus on site, language, and transpositions in visual and performance practices through post-conceptual approaches. She is the co-founder of SB34, a non-profit organization dedicated to providing production spaces and programming for experimental practices. Recent projects include one led by Simon Asencio, exploring dialects as culturally invested languages through intertextual procedures.
Pauline collaborates regularly with institutions and served as Associate Curator at WIELS, where she curated several exhibitions, including Thea Djordjadze’s, the ceiling of a courtyard (2023), and the 2024 edition of the programme Indiscipline. The latter reflects on the legacy of the EXPRMNTL film festival, featuring artists such as Michael Snow, Eleanor Ivory Weber, Ufuoma Essi, Lenio Kaklea, and Nafaq.
She also teaches at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels and pursues a writing and publishing practice.
Pauline Hatzigeorgiou. Photo: Géraldine Jacques
Shaping what we owe (one another)
by Pauline Hatzigeorgiou
Our curatorial proposal for the Sommerakademie Paul Klee Cycle 2025 interrogates the entangled dynamics of debt and the precariat as an economy also operating within the art world(s). Debt, as a governance mechanism, profoundly shapes agency, desire, and subjection. Meanwhile, the precariat, framed as surplus labor, remains essential to neoliberal systems, influencing not only artistic production but also the very structure of cultural labor.
In a context increasingly marked by liberalization and fascization, how might we defy or resist the logics that impose control through economic and social subjugation? How might we build alternative ways of creating, thinking, and organizing that challenge these structures? Drawing on the concept of auto-reduction, we ask whether artists and art workers might intentionally scale down production or withdraw from dominant imperatives. Might abstraction, as both an aesthetic and political tool, serve as a strategy for such refusal? How can these practices, coupled with ideas of fugacity and collective self-determination, challenge the totalizing forces of debt governance?
Taking as a starting point the idea of "shared incompleteness" as a collective and reciprocal condition – formulated, for instance, by Harney and Moten: “Our indebtedness is all we have, and all we have is what we owe to ‘one another’” – we plan to experiment with poetics and visual assemblies as means of fostering solidarity, refusal, and hope.
The Sommerakademie Paul Klee SPK is an international residency programme affiliated with the Bern Academy of the Arts HKB. The Sommerakademie Paul Klee 2025 will be a one-year cycle, curated by art historian and curator Pauline Hatzigeorgiou.
Pauline Hatzigeorgiou will present her curatorial framework on Wednesday, 21 May 2025 at 6 p.m. at Kapitel Bollwerk in Bern, as part of the GK zu Gast talks. You are very welcome to join!
Pauline Hatzigeorgiou has invited three guests, Nika Dubrovsky, Niloufar Emamifar, and Georgia Sagri, and Bern Academy of the Arts HKB Alumna, Karen Amanda Moser, to work on a tightly curated set of questions in Bern from 4–8 August 2025.
During this first meeting, they will be designing a workshop programme that will be taking place from 10–14 November 2025 at the HKB for students of the Master programme of the Contemporary Art Practices (CAP), and the Bachelor students of Art Education and Fine Arts of the HKB. During this week, there will be a second public event where Pauline Hatzigeorgiou will reflect on the group’s work (date and time tba).
Nika Dubrovsky is an artist and author of books she calls «visual essays», which have been translated into multiple languages. She is currently developing the «...Made Differently» series of books (MIT, 2024), initially co-authored with her late husband, activist, and anthropologist David Graeber. She is the founder of the David Graeber Institute and the open-source project Museum of Care. Her texts have been featured in publications such as e-flux, Artnet, and ArtReview.
Niloufar Emamifar is a multidisciplinary artist and architect based in New York. Niloufar Emamifar has exhibited work at various institutions, including Künstlerhaus Stuttgart (2023); MoMA PS1, NY (2022); The Renaissance Society, Chicago (2022); SculptureCenter, NY (2021); Hammer Museum, LA (2021); FELIX GAUDLITZ, Wien (2021); Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Texas (2020); Human Resources, Los Angeles (2019); Maxwell Graham gallery, NY (2018); Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, LA (2017); the Venice Biennale of Architecture, Italy (2016). She has participated in programs including Whitney Independent Study Program (ISP), Capp Street Fellowship at Wattis Institute, San Francisco, Core Residency Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Amant Foundation in New York, and London College of Communication in London. Niloufar Emamifar holds a BFA in Architecture from Soore School of Architecture in Tehran, Iran and an MFA in Studio Art from the University of California, Irvine.
Georgia Sagri is a pioneering visual artist who explores political, social, philosophical, and ecological themes by pushing the boundaries of somatic experience. Her practice spans sculpture, sound, and installation, emphasizing an economy of means while focusing on self-recovery and collective care through performance art. Her work has been exhibited at Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Palais de Tokyo, Gropius Bau, Kunsthalle Basel, Guggenheim Bilbao, and MoMA. She has participated in major art events such as documenta 14, Manifesta 11, the Istanbul Biennial, the Lyon Biennial, and the Whitney Biennial. Her works are part of prominent collections, including the Onassis Foundation, Art Collection Telekom, Fondazione CRC, and the National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens. Sagri is also the founder of the art space ΥΛΗ[matter]HYLE.
Karen Amanda Moser's artistic practice investigates phenomena influencing our social, monetary and ecological values. Research on the circumstances and conditions of production – of art and other physical and ideological commodities – as well as the associated power structures, form a substantial part of their work. Amongst various media selected in concept-oriented processes, language plays a central role as material and tool for critical reflection. Karen studied Fine Arts, Art History, Philosophy and Theatre Science in Bern and Antwerpen. During artist residencies in Genova and Paris, the artist focused on how to subversively move through canonical institutions and narratives. Some of Karens work is exhibited at times in different places, other work stays invisible or manifests through curating exhibitions, conversations and small collaborations.
We are excited to announce our new curator for the SPK cycle 2025!
Pauline Hatzigeorgiou is an art historian and curator based in Brussels. Her work often engages with the economic conditions that shape artistic production, with a focus on site, language, and transpositions in visual and performance practices through post-conceptual approaches. She is the co-founder of SB34, a non-profit organization dedicated to providing production spaces and programming for experimental practices. Recent projects include one led by Simon Asencio, exploring dialects as culturally invested languages through intertextual procedures.
Pauline collaborates regularly with institutions and served as Associate Curator at WIELS, where she curated several exhibitions, including Thea Djordjadze’s, the ceiling of a courtyard (2023), and the 2024 edition of the programme Indiscipline. The latter reflects on the legacy of the EXPRMNTL film festival, featuring artists such as Michael Snow, Eleanor Ivory Weber, Ufuoma Essi, Lenio Kaklea, and Nafaq.
She also teaches at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels and pursues a writing and publishing practice.
Pauline Hatzigeorgiou. Photo: Géraldine Jacques
Shaping what we owe (one another)
by Pauline Hatzigeorgiou
Our curatorial proposal for the Sommerakademie Paul Klee Cycle 2025 interrogates the entangled dynamics of debt and the precariat as an economy also operating within the art world(s). Debt, as a governance mechanism, profoundly shapes agency, desire, and subjection. Meanwhile, the precariat, framed as surplus labor, remains essential to neoliberal systems, influencing not only artistic production but also the very structure of cultural labor.
In a context increasingly marked by liberalization and fascization, how might we defy or resist the logics that impose control through economic and social subjugation? How might we build alternative ways of creating, thinking, and organizing that challenge these structures? Drawing on the concept of auto-reduction, we ask whether artists and art workers might intentionally scale down production or withdraw from dominant imperatives. Might abstraction, as both an aesthetic and political tool, serve as a strategy for such refusal? How can these practices, coupled with ideas of fugacity and collective self-determination, challenge the totalizing forces of debt governance?
Taking as a starting point the idea of "shared incompleteness" as a collective and reciprocal condition – formulated, for instance, by Harney and Moten: “Our indebtedness is all we have, and all we have is what we owe to ‘one another’” – we plan to experiment with poetics and visual assemblies as means of fostering solidarity, refusal, and hope.
The Sommerakademie Paul Klee SPK is an international residency programme affiliated with the Bern Academy of the Arts HKB. The Sommerakademie Paul Klee 2025 will be a one-year cycle, curated by art historian and curator Pauline Hatzigeorgiou.
Pauline Hatzigeorgiou will present her curatorial framework on Wednesday, 21 May 2025 at 6 p.m. at Kapitel Bollwerk in Bern, as part of the GK zu Gast talks. You are very welcome to join!
Pauline Hatzigeorgiou has invited three guests, Nika Dubrovsky, Niloufar Emamifar, and Georgia Sagri, and Bern Academy of the Arts HKB Alumna, Karen Amanda Moser, to work on a tightly curated set of questions in Bern from 4–8 August 2025.
During this first meeting, they will be designing a workshop programme that will be taking place from 10–14 November 2025 at the HKB for students of the Master programme of the Contemporary Art Practices (CAP), and the Bachelor students of Art Education and Fine Arts of the HKB. During this week, there will be a second public event where Pauline Hatzigeorgiou will reflect on the group’s work (date and time tba).
