Statement on the current situation

Dear Friends of Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen,

The team at Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen is currently very busy starting up operations again and reprogramming the spring events that had to be postponed due to the corona virus.

After the lifting of restrictions on going out at the beginning of May, in the second half of the month it was possible to catch up on studio changes for artists living on site. We are happy to welcome Margarethe Drexel, Judith Klemenc and Nicole Weniger as new studio users! A big thank you for the years of successful cooperation goes to those artists who have moved out: Kata Hinterlechner and Bosko Gastager, Stephan Pirker and Maria Walcher.

The Fellowship Program for Art and Theory 2019-20 has been extended until December 2020. The current fellows Anna Dasović, KURS, Lena Ditte Nissen and Airi Triisberg will be returning to Innsbruck at points during the summer and autumn months, continuing their respective residencies. The final exhibition of the fellowship year will be opened in the Kunstpavillon on November 19th. Most of the events that were planned for the Second Büchsenhausen Focus Week 2020 at the beginning of April will also be held on that same weekend.

In July and August, in our monthly programme Büchs’n’Radio on Radio Freirad, we will be broadcasting the recording of a conversation between our fellow Airi Triisberg and the cultural manager and filmmaker Sasha Ihnatovich, which took place under the heading Movement Politics in Eastern Europe: Focus Belarus as part of the first Büchsenhausen Focus Weeks 2020 in January this year. Details can be found later in this newsletter.

The jury procedure for the fellowship year 2020-21, which had already started before the introduction of corona-related mobility restrictions, was continued and successfully concluded in mid-April by means of exclusively online interviews. The jury of experts consisting of Jochen Becker (freelance curator, author, member of the advisory board of Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen), Silvia Franceschini (curator at the Z33 – House for Contemporary Art in Hasselt, Belgium) and Andrei Siclodi (curator, director of Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen) made their selection from more than 170 applications and have invited the artists Kush Badhwar, Yara Haskiel, Ash Moniz and Mykola Ridnyi to work on their submitted projects at Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen. We are currently planning to start the new fellowship year – at least partially – in October 2020, insofar as the external borders of the EU open again soon. Further details about the fellows and their projects will be published in September.

In the summer months of July and August we have decided in favor of a spontaneous cooperation with the studio das weisse haus in Vienna. Our studio users Judith Klemenc, Nora Schöpfer and Benjamin Zanon will each be able to work in Vienna within the framework of one-week residencies. In return, three artists currently using a studio in das weisse haus will come to Innsbruck: Jackie Grassmann, Yoshinori Niwa and Julian Palacz.

We hope to see you and your friends again at Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen’s events as from September. We will keep you up to date with the continuing autumn program via this medium, as well as on our homepage and on Facebook.

Until then, we wish you all the most relaxing summer possible! Stay well!

Andrei Siclodi

Executive and Program Director, Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen