Georg Schöllhammer
Georg Schöllhammer, Vienna, 13 June 2022
“One could really never speak of a homogenous Eastern Europe.”
“Curating in a state of crisis”—it’s a topic on which the Austrian art and architecture critic Georg Schöllhammer has spent many years working (frequently together with Hedwig Saxenhuber). As a publicist, as co-publisher of the magazine “Springerin,” as an important protagonist of Documenta 12, as a curator, and as a member of the Kontakt Collection’s Art Advisory Committee, he has always operated within “hot” zones of the international avant-garde that the mainstream is fond of mistaking for “peripheral” areas or framing as hip trends. In the present conversation, held in 2022 against the backdrop of the Ukraine War, Schöllhammer expresses his disquiet at the increasingly bellicose debates over culture and solidarity. Defying the “momentum of large institutions” that stage “trophy shows” of art from Eastern Europe or the Global South, he still holds fast to his belief in painstaking research that does justice to individual as well as regional and national idiosyncrasies.
“One could really never speak of a homogenous Eastern Europe.”
“Curating in a state of crisis”—it’s a topic on which the Austrian art and architecture critic Georg Schöllhammer has spent many years working (frequently together with Hedwig Saxenhuber). As a publicist, as co-publisher of the magazine “Springerin,” as an important protagonist of Documenta 12, as a curator, and as a member of the Kontakt Collection’s Art Advisory Committee, he has always operated within “hot” zones of the international avant-garde that the mainstream is fond of mistaking for “peripheral” areas or framing as hip trends. In the present conversation, held in 2022 against the backdrop of the Ukraine War, Schöllhammer expresses his disquiet at the increasingly bellicose debates over culture and solidarity. Defying the “momentum of large institutions” that stage “trophy shows” of art from Eastern Europe or the Global South, he still holds fast to his belief in painstaking research that does justice to individual as well as regional and national idiosyncrasies.