Tour of private collections, artist studio visits, and museum visits.

To start the day, students were given a tour of a private collection by the Berlin collector, Stefan Glamp, who has been involved in contemporary art since the mid-1990s and has been running an exhibition space for contemporary art at the Südstern in Berlin-Kreuzberg since 2017. Glamp was preparing for a new exhibition, Insights.Outsights., featuring artists Daniel Pitín, Carlos Sagrera, and Tino Geiss.

After the tour, Glamp drove students to the studio of painter Erik Schmidt for an in depth look into his work. Schmidt’s work has often been shaped by the narratives of his travel experiences and his desire to illustrate what he perceives by the encounter with foreign cultures. His new work introduced us to a six-week trip he made last spring to Sri Lanka, across the villages surrounding Colombo, the capital city where mass protests began in March 2022 and spread all over the country. Schmidt also shared some older experimental movies he made years ago.

Next, students visited the Hamburger Bahnhof where they first viewed, Collapsed Time, a solo exhibition of the US painter Christina Quarles. This installation occupied the entire exhibition space: gauze panels divided the rooms, similar to translucent theatre scrims used to reveal and obscure actors, décors, and objects. The formal language of Quarles’ paintings explore the experience of living in a racialized, queer body. Her figures contend with the boundaries of identity, as they intervene with complex patterns and planes.

Also on display was, Broken Music Vol. 2, an exhibition looking at artists’ engagement with the vinyl records over the past seven decades. The exhibition presented 700 records, arranged in ten chapters, to explore the development of the record as an artistic medium from the post-war period to the present and drew links with the fields of music in composition and improvisation, pop, punk and techno. The exhibition’s panorama is expanded by sound works from the National Gallery’s extensive collection, including spacious sound installations and immersive media works. By highlighting the interactions between the record and the fields of music, performance and sound art, colors are transformed into sounds and sounds into pictures. The show featured iconic covers by artists from Andy Warhol to Barbara Kruger as well as intensive sound installations by Christina Kubisch and Susan Philipsz.