Louisa Elderton
Becoming Writing: Navigating Art Through the Written Word
18. – 30. 8. 25
Why does art writing matter amid the AI boom? If artificial intelligence chatbots can steer everything we have to say about visual culture, why not just handover the baton? This course centres the creative and personal imperatives of writing about art. How can body, sensation, and thought become writing? Whether you’re a critic, journalist, art historian, curator, gallerist, artist, or someone who wants to try their hand at something new, the framework of this class encourages deep engagement with the roles of imagination, criticality, and perspective in art writing.
Over a two-week period, we will look at how identity, memory, context, and culture can shape our interpretation of contemporary art, not only intellectually, but also from an embodied standpoint. Through individual and group exercises in looking, reading, writing, and editing, you will go onto develop a piece of work that brings together our experiments with form, style, voice, argument, and narrative, through which you will find your own original way of writing.
key data
- Venue
- Festung Hohensalzburg
- Date
- 18. – 30. 8. 25
- Teaching language
- English (German possible)
- Participation fee
- 670 Euro (reduced 495 Euro)
- Requirements
- None
- What to bring
- Pen, Paper, Laptop
- Maximum number of participants
- 20
Louisa Elderton
Louisa Elderton is a British art critic, writer, and editor based in Berlin. She is the Managing Editor for ICI Berlin Press, an independent, non-profit publisher that promotes radical lines of questioning, diverse voices, and novel approaches to academic scholarship. Her writing has been featured in numerous publications including Artforum, Art Monthly, Artnet News, Art Review, Frieze, Flash Art, Harper’s Bazaar, Mousse, The New York Times, Vogue, and many more, as well as in gallery and museum catalogues and artist monographs. With significant experience of working for cultural institutions and galleries, from 2019–2022 she was Curatorial Editor at Gropius Bau, Chief Editor of Side Magazine for Bergen Assembly 2022, and a freelance Managing Editor for KW Institute for Contemporary Art. From 2016–2019 she was Project Editor of Phaidon’s acclaimed ‘Vitamin’ series and Content Editor of Great Women Artists, and from 2011–16 she was a Curator & Artist Liaison at Blain|Southern. With a Master’s degree in ‘Curating the Art Museum’ from The Courtauld Institute of Art, she specialised in learning and interpretation, as part of which she worked in the Research department at Tate.
Website
Publications
Magazines & newspapers (selected)
“Rebecca Ackroyd, Peres Projects”, in: Artforum, forthcoming, April 2021.
“Xinyi Cheng, Hamburger Bahnhof”, in: Flash Art, forthcoming, March 2021.
“This Year’s Steirischer Herbst Switches Between Programmes”, in: Frieze, November 2020.
“Vienna Contemporary has a new look and new leadership, but it remains a staid regional fair”, in: artnet News, 30 September 2019.
“An Electric Temple of Culture Fires Up”, in: The New York Times, 11 September 2019.
“Christian Nyampeta’s Study of the Cultural Acts of Colonial Violence”, in: Frieze, 3 September 2019.
Book contributions (selected)
Flower: Exploring the World in Bloom (Phaidon, 2020).
The New Mediterranean (Gestalten, 2019).
Anatomy: Exploring the Human Body (Phaidon, 2019).
Animal: Exploring the Zoological World (Phaidon, 2018).
Flying Too Close to the Sun: Myths in Contemporary Art from Classical to Contemporary (Phaidon, 2018).
Universe: Exploring the Astronomical World (Phaidon, 2017).
Editing (selected)
Managing editor of Yayoi Kusama. A Retrospective (Gropius Bau/Prestel, 2021).
Project editor of Vitamin D3: New Perspectives in Drawing (Phaidon, 2021).
Managing editor of Leonilson: Drawn, 1975–1993 (KW Institute/Hatje Cantz, 2020).
Co-editor of Otobong Nkanga: There’s No Such Thing as Solid Ground (Gropius Bau 2020).
Managing editor of Lee Mingwei (Gropius Bau/Silvana Editoriale, 2020).
Content editor of Great Women Artists (Phaidon, 2019).
