Christian Kosmas Mayer
After Eden: Art With and Against the Garden
20. 7. – 1. 8. 26
This course approaches the garden as both a living system and a political site. It combines artistic fieldwork in Salzburg’s historic gardens with studio practice to explore the promises of the garden and to examine the forms of power that shape it. Working with the garden means attuning to its rhythms and material realities. Working against the garden means questioning it as an apparatus of design, control, and exclusion.
Through guided visits and fieldwork, participants observe, map, listen, collect traces, and read histories. This shared research becomes material for studio work and links local sites to wider questions of colonial botany, classification, tourism, labour, and the biodiversity crisis.
Daily sessions in the studio combine brief input from the instructor with hands-on making and group critiques. Participants develop individual projects across media, supported by a process field-book. A small garden space inside Fortress Hohensalzburg serves as an occasional extension of the studio. Here, we build a shared base for testing methods, staging reversible interventions, and for simply spending time together.
key data
- Venue
- Festung Hohensalzburg
- Date
- 20. 7. – 1. 8. 26
- Teaching language
- English (German possible)
- Participation fee
- 670 Euro (reduced 495 Euro)
- Requirements
- Willingness to discuss and work in groups, and to engage in independent creative exploration and experimentation.
- What to bring
- Participants should bring materials they prefer to work with, such as paints, clay, fabrics, photo camera, notebook or digital tools.
- Maximum number of participants
- 20
Christian Kosmas Mayer
Christian Kosmas Mayer’s cross-media and installation-based works and projects are the result of extensive artistic research and close collaboration with experts from various disciplines. His works aim at a critical re-evaluation of history and the present by placing evolutionary and natural phenomena within a cultural-historical and scientific framework. A central focus of his work is the exploration of questions surrounding archiving and conservation as acts of historical awareness.
Website
Exhibitions
Selected solo exhibitions:
2025 Wearing the Walls (with Sonia Leimer), Ursula Blickle Stiftung, Wien.
2023 and yet you grow, MAK Center, Los Angeles, CA (US).
2022 The Life Story of Cornelius Johnson's Olympic Oak and Other Matters of Survival, Austrian Cultural Forum, New York, NY (US).
En deux mille cent quatre-vingt-un, le monde entier verra sa fin, Galerie Mezzanin, Geneva (CH).
2019 Aeviternity, mumok – Museum für Moderne Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna.
Unverhofftes Wiedersehen, Galerie Nagel Draxler, Berlin.
2013 Musis et Mulis, Belvedere, Vienna.
Selected group exhibitions:
2025 The World Without Us, Lentos Kunstmuseum, Linz (AT).
2024 Heaven can wait, Innsbruck International Biennial of the Arts, Innsbruck (AT).
2023 SHIFT – AI and a future community, Kunstmuseum Stuttgart (DE).
On Genes and Human Beings, Deutsches Hygiene-Museum Dresden (DE).
2022 Welcome to Planet B, Ars Electronica Festival, Linz.
2019 Daguerre's Soup, Kunstforum, Vienna.
2017 Publishing as an Artistic Toolbox: 1989–2017, Kunsthalle, Vienna.
2016 Mit anderen Augen – Das Portrait in der zeitgenössischen Fotografie, Kunstmuseum Bonn (DE).
2015 Flirting with Strangers, 21er Haus, Belvedere, Vienna.
2008 Manifesta 7, Rovereto (IT).
2004 26th São Paulo Biennial, São Paulo (BR).
Prizes:
2022 Falling Walls Breakthroughs in Art and Science, Berlin.
2020 Outstanding Artist Award, Ministry for Culture of the Republic of Austria.
2011 Kardinal-König-Kunstpreis, Salzburg (AT).
Publications
Voice without Breath, Schaufler Lab@TU Dresden, Sandstein Verlag, Dresden, 2024.
First Monograph, Phileas, DISTANZ Verlag, Berlin, 2023.
The Book of Record of the Palm Capsule, Mark Pezinger Books, Vienna, 2020.
Aeviternity, mumok, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne, 2019.
