Each semester, renowned international artists join the Master Fine Arts faculty as guest lecturers. In the autumn semester 22/23 Ima-Abasi Okon and Anna Speier will visit us. In addition, this semester Maria Eichhorn (lecturer Bachelor Fine Arts) will teach as a guest in the Master Fine Arts and will also accompany an excursion to the Venice Biennale.
Ima-Abasi Okon is an artist and works with sculpture, sound, and video. She employs exhibition-making as an exercise in syntax, adopting linguistic and grammatical structures as a way of complicating the construction of knowledge. In her recent works, Okon has repurposed industrial and handmade objects to explore the formation of taste, subjectivity, productivity and excess. Okon is living and working between London and Amsterdam. She has exhibited, among others, at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead; Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (all 2022); Tate Britain, London; New Museum Triennial, New York (both 2021); Chisenhale Gallery, London (2019); 13th Dak’Art Biennale, Dakar, Senegal; The Showroom, London (both 2018); and New Art Exchange, Nottingham (2017).
Anne Speier is an artist based in Vienna and Leipzig. Shifting between painting and sculpture, she experiments with the interplay of different aesthetic languages, materials and techniques to challenge and seek classical conditions of art making. Recent shows include Secession in Vienna; MUMOK, Vienna; Efremidis Gallery Berlin; Galerie Meyer Kainer, Vienna; Greene Naftali New York: Galerie der Stadt Schwaz; Portikus Frankfurt am Main and What Pipeline, Detroit. Between 2012 and 2021 she taught at the Object Sculpture department at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Since October 2021 she is a Professor of Painting at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig.
Maria Eichhorn is an artist and has been teaching at the ZHdK’s BFA since 2003. Her works have been exhibited at documenta11 in Kassel in 2002 and in documenta 14 in Kassel and Athens in 2017. In 2022 she participated in the Venice Biennale with a contribution to the German Pavilion.