Programme 2025

We are excited to announce our new curator and the programme of the Sommerakademie Paul Klee 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 organisation 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 Hatzigeorgiou 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’s curatorial proposal for the Sommerakademie Paul Klee Cycle 2025, Shaping what we owe (one another), 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 labour, remains essential to neoliberal systems, influencing not only artistic production but also the very structure of cultural labour. You can read the full curatorial framework here.

She will present her curatorial framework to the public on Wednesday, May 21, 2025 at 6pm at Kapitel Bollwerk/in transformation in Bern, as part of the GK zu Gast talks.

Pauline Hatzigeorgiou has also 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 August 4 to 8 2025. During this meeting, they will be designing a workshop programme that will be taking place from November 10 to 14 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 & time tba). You can read our guests’ bios here.

We would also like to take this opportunity to inform you that this will unfortunately be the last cycle of the Sommerakademie Paul Klee. Twenty years ago, the «Sommerakademie im Zentrum Paul Klee» foundation was established, which was replaced by the «Sommerakademie Paul Klee» association in 2017. Since then, Bern Academy of the Arts HKB has been the association’s institutional partner and has provided substantial support. While the residents of the Sommerakademie were able to benefit from the HKB facilities, the content developed during the summer sessions was passed on to HKB students in the form of workshops. Due to cantonal cost reduction measures, this collaboration between the Sommerakademie association and HKB will unfortunately no longer be possible from 2026. The association and the HKB very much regret this. The Association Sommerakademie Paul Klee will be dissolved at the end of 2025.

We would like to thank our supporters, followers and friends for the support and trust placed in our association. We would also like to thank all the former residents, fellows, curators, and speakers that participated and contributed to the Sommerakademie. We are looking forward to a great last year with Pauline Hatzigeorgiou’s programme.