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. It was founded in 2005 and restructured in 2017, as a two-year cycle. The last SPK cycles were curated by Tirdad Zolghadr, Dora García, and Andrea Thal. The Sommerakademie Paul Klee 2025 will be a one-year cycle, curated by art historian and curator Pauline Hatzigeorgiou.
One alumna*alumnus of the Bern Academy of the Arts HKB is invited to join the Sommerakademie Paul Klee (SPK) programme in 2025, to work on a tightly curated set of questions in Bern together with Pauline Hatzigeorgiou and her three guests, Nika Dubrovsky, Niloufar Emamifar, and Georgia Sagri.
Timing
Pauline Hatzigeorgiou, her three guests, and the HKB alumna*alumnus will gather in Bern from 4–8 August 2025, in order to design a workshop programme of 3 days. This workshop will be taking place as a Y-Toolbox in the week of 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.
Requirements
Application process
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. It was founded in 2005 and restructured in 2017, as a two-year cycle. The last SPK cycles were curated by Tirdad Zolghadr, Dora García, and Andrea Thal. The Sommerakademie Paul Klee 2025 will be a one-year cycle, curated by art historian and curator Pauline Hatzigeorgiou.
One alumna*alumnus of the Bern Academy of the Arts HKB is invited to join the Sommerakademie Paul Klee (SPK) programme in 2025, to work on a tightly curated set of questions in Bern together with Pauline Hatzigeorgiou and her three guests, Nika Dubrovsky, Niloufar Emamifar, and Georgia Sagri.
Timing
Pauline Hatzigeorgiou, her three guests, and the HKB alumna*alumnus will gather in Bern from 4–8 August 2025, in order to design a workshop programme of 3 days. This workshop will be taking place as a Y-Toolbox in the week of 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.
Requirements
Application process