While the exchange between the partners involved has been exclusively digital in recent months, a first opportunity for personal encounters is now opening up for eleven students at the art academy. Despite the Corona crisis, the HfBK was able to award the first research scholarships.
Eleven students have the opportunity to travel to Latvia for weeks and to participate in summer schools arranged by the Riga Academy together with fellow students there. The scholarships are funded by the DAAD and are subject to current hygiene regulations.
The time will be used to conduct research on Differences in the context of the EU4ART project. In the spirit of the alliance, the stay is intended to stimulate intercultural exchange between art students, which in turn will explore questions about the significance of art and culture for European identity. The impressions of the experience will be visualized in works, documented and thus made accessible to the public.
Four of the eleven fellows will be traveling to Latvia at the end of July. As part of the first Summer School, which will take place under the theme Negotiating Gender in the Baltics and Eastern Europe in Kuldīga from July 31 to August 5 and was initiated by the Latvian Center of Contemporary Arts (LCCA), the fellows will have the opportunity to participate in a diverse accompanying program that focuses on gender narratives marginalized in art history as well as on questions of everyday solidarity and emancipation in our time. In lectures, discussions, workshops, and artistic works, speakers including Norwegian scholar Redi Koobak, Latvian curator Jana Kukaine, and Finnish artist Jaana Kokko will analyze the legacies of post-socialism and post-colonialism through gender studies and intersectionality, among others.
With the second Summer School, which will take place in Riga from August 24 to 30, 7 scholarship holders will have the opportunity to acquire basic knowledge about Latvian art and art history. The Getting to know Latvian Art History program is organized by the Department of Art History and Theory at the Academy of Fine Arts in Riga. The 7-day workshop will take participants to places of Latvian art and cultural history. In addition to thematic focuses, such as the Art Nouveau period and contemporary art, other important regions such as Kuldīga and Rēzekne will be focused on. Key contributors include Latvian professor Silvija Grosa, as head of the Department of Art History and Theory, lecturer and curator Raimonds Kalējs, and director of the Art Bachelor's Program Inese Sirica.
