On June 27, starting at 10:30 am, the curator of the currently running exhibition “Fragile Narratives” Klaus Speidel, who contributes to F.A.Z., Spike and Parnass, among others, will be giving the workshop “Writing about Art”. The workshop will discuss art-theoretical as well as practical and personal questions: How is meaning assigned and fixated through texts? When is this problematic? How do I start when I want to write about a work, an artist or an exhibition? What do I expect from a good text? Which style suits me and the work? Should I mobilize references and if so which ones?

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After the workshop, Klaus Speidel will give guided tours of the exhibition in German or English at 4 and 6pm.

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To register for the workshop and the guided tours, just send a short mail to office@memphismemph.is. Costs for workshop: 15€. As we do not want to exclude anyone for financial reasons, we offer “writing scholarships” upon demand at the moment of inscription.

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As part of the ongoing exhibition “Fragile Narratives”, three different exhibitions are currently on view at Memphis. However, the works and their arrangement in the room do not change at all. They are only explained differently for each version. Curator Klaus Speidel, who developed the exhibition, explains how and why: “When you do a thematically framed exhibition, you always tell a story. Normally you pretend that this – and only this story – fits the works. But that is an illusion. Because every work of art allows different interpretations, according to Speidel, one can conceive quite different exhibitions with a single set of works. The guest curator invited by Memphis has therefore come up with three different subtitles and written as many different texts for the exhibition. One is about identities, another about artistic research, and a third about how traces of the past become narratives and stories that hide in everyday objects.

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Speidel is interested in “how a work gets a different meaning with every text and how the relationships of the works among each other change with each iteration”. For Speidel, who holds a PhD in Philosophy from Sorbonne and is currently working as a freelance critic, curator and Associated Researcher at the Laboratory for Empirical Science at the University of Vienna, it is crucial to allow the coexistence of different, non-exclusive stories: “This seems to me of the utmost importance especially now, with different parties and communities each trying to dictate their particular conception of the world and pretending that the story they are telling us is the only right one. I think that’s extremely dangerous.”

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In total, nine artists are involved in the exhibition. The visitors are also invited to search for the stories that the works keep hidden. Given this context, a workshop about writing about art makes particularly sense and is a chance to reflect further on the questions evoked by the show.

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Klaus Speidel