The Academy Must Answer

Main entrance to Leipzig’s Academy of Fine Arts, HGB. The anniversary programme “Ex/Changing” examines access to art education and the capacity of its institutions to change. Archive photograph, 2024. Photo: Arthur Zalewski / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

An invitation is a generous gesture. It also establishes who is doing the inviting and who is, for the moment, outside. That small asymmetry contains a substantial problem for an art school: it can open its doors while leaving untouched the standards through which it recognises talent, evaluates knowledge and distributes artistic authority. “Ex/Changing: Transculturality and institutional Work,” the anniversary programme at Leipzig’s Academy of Fine Arts, HGB, touches precisely this issue. For me, its significance lies in how seriously an institution is prepared to consider its own capacity to change.

HGB established the Academy for Transcultural Exchange, known as AtA, in 2016. According to the school, it was Germany’s first regular study programme in fine art and graphic design for people with experience of forced displacement to offer formal student enrolment. The four-semester programme prepares participants for diploma studies; it does not itself award a qualification. This distinction matters. Access acquires substance through the possibilities that follow: studio time, work within a class, sustained critical exchange and the prospect of developing an artistic practice under dependable conditions. Any discussion of openness must consider these transitions.

In this context, the choice of the letter as the basis for “Ex/Changing Letters,” the exhibition within the anniversary programme, is particularly suggestive. Handwritten invitations addressed to individuals request replies in different forms, including sketches, artworks and critical comments. At this stage, what can be assessed is a curatorial proposition. Its fulfilment will depend on the responses and the relationships the exhibition allows them to establish. The form nevertheless carries a productive demand: having someone’s address does not yet create a relationship. Someone has to read, respond and make room for what comes back.

A letter differs here from an application, although both may be addressed to an institution. An application submits a person for assessment. A reply can also call the person asking the question to account. For an art school, that would be a consequential shift. Students’ experiences would matter beyond their usefulness as evidence of successful support. They could reveal where a rule helps, where it obstructs access and what kinds of knowledge have yet to find an adequate place in teaching. An exhibition that admits these responses opens a demanding space. Its quality would depend, in part, on whether disagreement is allowed to retain a form of its own.

Another kind of categorisation requires equal care. Cultural institutions can too easily treat people who have experienced forced displacement as sources of testimony about displacement. Biography then takes interpretative control of their work. A painting becomes evidence before its composition has been considered; an experimental form is expected, above all, to explain an origin. Even sympathetic attention can narrow an artist’s room to act. A serious commitment to access should therefore protect the freedom to work on entirely different subjects, resist a clear identity assignment or leave an experience unspoken. No one owes an institution the aesthetic use of their wounds.

This makes the question of artistic standards more difficult, and more interesting. Judgement cannot simply be removed without depriving art education of its subject. A school must be able to debate precision, formal decisions and the strength of a proposal. What matters is how clearly those judgements can be explained and examined. Which visual traditions are taken for granted? When is verbal fluency mistaken for intellectual depth? How is work discussed when its points of reference are less familiar to the teachers? Transcultural teaching would require an expansion of the school’s own critical practice. Its ambition would be substantial: to perceive differences without explaining them away, and to exercise judgement without confusing familiarity with quality.

At HGB, this has a particular resonance. Within the art world, the name Leipzig already carries an expectation of recognisable tradition. A school may benefit from that recognition; for an individual student, it may also prescribe what others hope to see. AtA offers an opportunity to place a different emphasis on the idea of a school: a setting in which knowledge is passed on and altered by new experiences. This requires a willingness to take seriously work that complicates the institution’s familiar image of itself. For an art school, that complication can be an achievement.

Such changes require time and continuity. In its anniversary materials, HGB states that funding programmes that helped establish AtA have largely expired or face cuts. This is the school’s account of the funding environment, rather than evidence that AtA is about to close. It does, however, identify a contradiction extending beyond Leipzig: universities can embrace diversity in their mission statements while relying on temporary funding for the practical work it entails. Advice, language teaching, workshop access and dependable points of contact require paid working time and resources. When those conditions remain uncertain, accepting an invitation carries a risk that the inviting institution does not bear to the same degree.

That is why this anniversary deserves attention. HGB is making public a task against which its own conduct can be measured. It provides a substantial starting point for a dialogue whose outcome need not be predetermined. AtA’s most demanding achievement would be for its students to help shape the school as a matter of course, including when their ideas become inconvenient or refuse to fit a story of success. An institution that invites someone to answer must be prepared to learn something itself. The future of “Ex/Changing” rests on how fully that willingness can be sustained.

Exhibition and programme
Ex/Changing: Transculturality and institutional Work
Ten years of the Academy for Transcultural Exchange
Programme: 15–22 October 2026
Ex/Changing Letters exhibition: 16–22 October 2026
Exhibition opening: 16 October, 7 pm
HGB Galerie, Wächterstraße 11, 04107 Leipzig, Germany
Exhibition hours announced by HGB: Monday–Thursday, 2–6 pm

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