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 of ICI Berlin Press, an independent, non-profit publisher that promotes radical lines of questioning, diverse voices, and novel approaches to academic scholarship, and was also recently the Text and Editorial Lead for Bergen Assembly 2025. 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, she was Chief Editor of Side Magazine for Bergen Assembly 2022, Curatorial Editor at Gropius Bau from 2019–2022, and the Managing Editor of various publications for KW Institute for Contemporary Art and Hatje Cantz. 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. She has a Master’s degree in ‘Curating the Art Museum’ from The Courtauld Institute of Art, and specialised in learning and interpretation, as part of which she worked in the Research department at Tate.
Website
Publications
Selected Magazines and Newspapers
“Thea Djordjadze: Become Like a Resonance Chamber” in: Plus Magazine, Issue 9, 2025.
“Is Smell the Next Big Thing?” in: Artnet News, 28 December 2025.
“Yayoi Kusama Is Still One of Our Most Important Artists” in: Frieze, 30 October 2025.
“How Ukrainian Artists Are Grappling with the War” in Artsy, 4 March 2025.
“Mortal Machines: Mire Lee” in: Flash Art, Issue 343, Fall, 2024.
“An Electric Temple of Culture Fires Up“ in: The New York Times, 11 September 2019.
Selected Book Chapters
An Endless Play of Surfaces: The Paintings of Erik Schmidt (essay for exhibition catalogue by KINDL, Berlin, 2025).
Vitamin V: Video and Moving Image in Contemporary Art (Phaidon, 2025).
Vitamin Txt: Words in Contemporary Art (Phaidon, 2024).
Vitamin C+: Collage in Contemporary Art (Phaidon, 2023).
Prime: Art’s Next Generation (Phaidon, 2022).
Birds: Exploring the Winged World (Phaidon, 2021).
Selected Editorial Work
Editor of Bergen Assembly 2025 Reader: across, with, nearby (Bergen Assembly 2025).
Copyeditor of Against Morality by Rosanna McLaughlin (Floating Opera Press, 2025).
Copyeditor of Imperfect Solidarities by Aruna D'Souza (Floating Opera Press, 2024).
Chief Editor of Side Magazine: Yasmine and the Seven Faces of the Heptahedron (Bergen Assembly/Wirklichkeit Books, 2022).
Managing Editor of Dayanita Singh: Dancing with my Camera (Gropius Bau/Hatje Cantz, 2022).
Managing Editor of Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective (Gropius Bau/Prestel, 2021).
Project Editor of Vitamin D3: New Perspectives in Painting (Phaidon, 2021).
Content Editor of Great Women Artists (Phaidon, 2019).
