about

CURATORIAL FIELDWORK
The curatorial team made advanced research trips to sites across Hungary and Germany to learn more about how nuclear questions impact local communities, find local collaborators, informants and stakeholders and learn about how potential artistic projects and initiatives might relate to local sites. 

RESEARCH RESIDENCIES
We have commissioned six artists to produce works informed by and often situated in rural and peripheral communities directly impacted by nuclear legacies and ongoing nuclear projects. Invited artists will have the opportunity to do research residencies at one or more of the sites we are focusing on. 

ARTIST-LED FIELD TRIPS
In order to allow direct encounter with remote rural localities impacted by nuclear energy production, two artists will be commissioned to lead field trips to sites connected to Germany or Hungary’s nuclear histories.

RESEARCH ASSEMBLY
Many of us involved in this project are amateurs, researching on what can be a highly technical topic. In November 2023, we – curators, invited artists, knowledge holders, researchers and the public - will gather at nGbK’s new premises at Alexanderplatz to learn together and explore the topic of nuclear pasts, and energy futures. 

ON-SITE PRESENTATIONS
Our commissioned artists have been invited to present the projects that they created firstly in the communities that hosted, inspired and collaborated with them. 

RESEARCH BLOG & CO2 LOGBOOK
SALT. CLAY. ROCK. is a curatorial and artistic research project. Our blog presents some of the ongoing research that we curators and the participating artists and designers have done while tangling with the subject and unique contexts of the project.
Our Co2 logbook documents our efforts to produce a climate neutral exhibit and presents some of the difficulties and critical conversations we’ve had towards these efforts. 

EXHIBITION
In November 2024, SALT. CLAY. ROCK. will invite you to the exhibition that concludes this project.

Katalin Erdödi (Budapest/Vienna) works as a curator, dramaturg and researcher, with a focus on socially engaged art, experimental performance and interventions in public space. Her cross-disciplinary practice ranges from curating festivals and exhibitions to collaborating with artists on site-specific, participatory projects that explore the potential of art as social practice. In 2020 she received the Igor Zabel Award Grant for her locally embedded and inclusive curatorial work. She has been a curator at steirischer herbst (Graz), Impulse Theater Festival (NRW), brut/imagetanz festival (Vienna), GfZK (Leipzig), PLACCC Festival and Trafó House of Contemporary Arts (Budapest). As part of her PhD in Curating (ZHdK Zurich/University of Reading UK) she is currently researching socio-political transformation in post-socialist rural places, with a focus on Hungary (title: Working Towards a Rural Agonistics - Curating Critical Rural Art Practices as Counterpublics). Reference projects: Rural Productive Forces - A collaborative village play with Antje Schiffers/Myvillages (trans-local collaborations in Belarus, Germany, Hungary and Spain, 2021-2023); News Medley with Alicja Rogalska and the Women’s Choir of Kartal (OFF Biennale Budapest, 2020-2021); I like being a farmer and I would like to stay one with Antje Schiffers/Myvillages (Ludwig Museum Budapest, 2017-2018).

Marc Herbst (Bozen/Leipzig) is an artist, writer and  co-editor of The Journal of Aesthetics & Protest (Joaap). He is a research associate at the Free University of Bolzano’s art department, his PhD from Goldsmiths focused on how cultural forms help co-organize relations in the light of radical climate change. His often collaborative practice incorporates publications, performance, critical praxis, illustration  and cultural organizing. Recent publishing pre: co-editor/co-publisher with Pluto Press and Max Haiven, We are Nature Defending Itself by Jay Jordan and Isa Fremeaux, 2021: Co-editor (with Michelle Teran) Everything Gardens! Growing in the Ruins of Modernity as the Princessinengarten’s contribution to the nGbK Licht, Luft, Scheisse project which was released by NGBK/ADOKS in 2019. He is an unofficial advisor to the Snake River Alliance, a historic anti-nuclear organization and activist group in Idaho (USA), and as a research fellow there looked into changing theologies of the area’s indigenous, Mormon and also mainstream Christian communities. 
https://marcherbst.wordpress.com/

Julia Kurz (Leipzig) is a curator, art educator and writer, who experiments with formats and methods of emancipatory (un)learning and knowledge exchange. She has hosted and developed exhibitions, public programs, workshops and publications locally and internationally, in urban and rural contexts, working mostly transdiciplinary and in collectives. Collaborations include the collective and project space dieschönestadt in Halle (Saale) (2008 - 2012), Public Art Worker (2009 - 2013), and Kompliz* (since 2018), a network that supports exchange between urban and rural NGOs, cultural organizations and artists across Saxony. Between 2006-2016 she worked as a curator, producer and educator for the Museum of Contemporary Art Leipzig (GfZK) on various research and exhibition projects, a.o. Up Till Now - Reconsidering Performance and Actionist Art from the GDR (2013), Responsive Subjects – Designing Collective Actions (2013-2014), and Travesty for Advanced Performers (2015-2016). Since 2023 she is developing a Curating the City - program (Stadtkurator*innen-Programm) for the City of Leipzig. Further institutions she worked for and collaborated with are, a.o. Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau, neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst Berlin, BURG Giebichenstein University of Art and Design Halle, and Dresden State Art Collections. Between 2016 and 2023 she teached as a research associate at the Cultures of the Curatorial program (HGB Leipzig), where she still is a PhD candidate. 

Virág Major-Kremer (Berlin) is a curator and art manager, with an academic background in international relations, art management and curating.She is currently working as Producer and Researcher in Science, Media and Digital Practices  at HKW Berlin. She has worked internationally in the field of visual arts, from contemporary galleries in Budapest, through project management for the Contemporary Architecture Center in Budapest and curatorial assistance at dOCUMENTA(13), to the Cultural Manager position at the Vasarely Museum Budapest.  In her curatorial practice she often focuses on education, developing empowering and informal formats for learning combining practical and discursive concerns.   She was artistic director of The School of Free Printing (2015-2020), an informal artistic-civic educational project in Hungary based on methods of reform pedagogist Célestin Freinet, and the two-year project DemoLab (2018-2020). Especially passionate about artistic engagement with gardens and landscapes and the non-human, she edited the publication Reap and Sow (2015) and is co-author of the traveling exhibition and book TRANSYLVANIA RETOUCHED (2020). More: https://virag.cargo.site/

Vincent Schier (Berlin) works as a curator. He was artistic director at the Kunstverein Göttingen and worked at  the Kunsthaus Dresden, the GfZK in Leipzig and the nGbK in Berlin. He has realized projects for the neuer berliner kunstverein, the Kunstraum Kreuzberg Bethanien, the Kunsthalle Osnabrück, Schwules Museum Berlin and the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, among others, and has taught at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig and the Burg Giebichenstein Kunsthochschule in Halle. In his exhibition practice, his main focus is on social and ecological issues and process-based and collaborative working methods. He is interested in rethinking institutional structures and questions of sustainability, also in the field of art.