SIE

Summer School in Contemporary Art and Curatorship
From documenta to the Biennale

Summer School Programme Applications Faculty

Summer School

In the first venture of its kind, the Summer School in Contemporary Art and Curatorship offers students the chance to gain insight into the management principles of two of the world's most important contemporary art exhibitions: the Kassel documenta and La Biennale di Venezia.

Since 2019 the programme has brought together the expertise of scholars, artists and curators from the hosting cities Kassel (Germany), and Venice (Italy) in a full-time Summer School in which students have the chance to fully immerse themselves in contemporary art and curatorship for 4 weeks, through lectures and visits of exhibition spaces in both Kassel and Venice.

In 2025 our 2-week programme will continue to investigate the history of these influential large-scale events, while focusing on the Venice component through on-site visits to selected venues of the 19th International Architecture Exhibition (international exhibition, national pavilions, collateral events) and with visits to historical venues of Fondazione La Biennale di Venezia.

Programme

Intended as “large-scale perennial exhibitions of contemporary art”, Biennials have proved to be “the medium through which most contemporary art comes to be known” (Elena Filipovic, Marieke Van Hal, Solveig Øvstebø, The Biennial Reader, 2010). Located in Venice, a city with an outstanding cultural offer and “mother of all Biennials”, the Summer School intends to explore the contemporary art system(s) on the basis of an exhibition format which acted as a model for the “Biennialization” of the present-day art world.

Held in collaboration with La Biennale di Venezia’s “Biennale Sessions” programme, the Summer School will provide students with an up-to-date insight into the history and the present activities of Kassel's documenta and the Venice Biennale in the framework of exhibition and curatorial studies.

The programme is implemented with targeted training activities on exhibitionary and curatorial practices from five focus areas:

  • Sub-Saharan Africa
  • East Asia
  • Latin America
  • Russia, Caucasus and Central Asia
  • Middle East, North Africa and South Asia (MENASA region)

For each focus area, a dedicated instructor with expertise in both academic lecturing and curatorial practice will hold in-class seminars and talks with artists and curators from the related areas. The programme will combine individual study and teamwork activities and will alternate lectures and site-visits with a full-time schedule. Assignments will be given upon oral presentations.

Prerequisites: Students must have completed an undergraduate degree, and are required to have studied or be currently studying the following subjects at a University level: Art History; Fine Arts, Design and Architecture; Cultural and Media Studies; Exhibition and Curatorial Studies; Media Studies; Global Studies; Arts and Cultural Management.

Applications

Applications are now open. The deadline to apply is May 11th, 2025.

Fee

€ 800

Application process

How to apply in a few steps:

  1. Read the overall course schedule carefully (you can find it on the Summer Courses webpage) to avoid class conflicts
  2. Fill out this online form to choose the courses you want to enrol in
  3. The teaching committee reviews your application for approval of any prerequisites and schedule conflicts
  4. We send you an email to confirm you have been accepted in your selected course/courses, with information on how to make the payment for the courses' fees.
  5. Pay the fees within 10 days since we send you the email with instructions
  6. Your spot in the courses you chose is confirmed

Faculty

Silvia Burini

Silvia Burini

Programme Director

Silvia Burini is Professor of History of Contemporary Art, History of Russian Art and Curatorship at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice.

Matteo Bertelè

Matteo Bertelè

Executive Director

Matteo Bertelè is Professor of Contemporary Art, History of Russian Art and Curatorship at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice.

Elena Agudio

Elena Agudio

Elena Agudio (PhD) is art historian and curator. Between 2013 and 2022 she has been artistic co-director of SAVVY Contemporary – The Laboratory of Form-Ideas. She also writes and teaches, currently being theory lecturer at the Master Degree in Spatial Strategies at the Weißensee School of Art in Berlin. In 2017 and 2018 she was Guestprofessor at HFBK in Hamburg and Resident Fellow at Helsinki University of the Arts. The principal concerns of her practice are: migration and diasporic belonging, decanonisation, feminisms, ecological and planetary habitability, and the creation of sustainable infrastructures for and with vulnerable communities. Since December 2022 she is the new director of Villa Romana in Florence.

Among the last curated and co-curated projects: Latitude on Air: Unsettling Power Relations (radio festival with Goethe-Institut and reboot.fm); Exlamating Still! On the Noise of Images (Rencontres de Bamako – African Biennale of Photography); SAVVY FUNK. An iteration of Every Time A Ear di Soun — a documenta 14 Radio Program (SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin, in collaboration with Documenta 14 and Deutschlandfunk).

Manuela Lietti

Manuela Lietti

Manuela Lietti is an independent art critic and curator specializing in contemporary Asian art who lives and works between Beijing and Milan. Since 2003, she has been active as a curator, critic, and coordinator of gallery and museum exhibitions, as well as public art projects in China and abroad.

Manuela is the curator of the 2024 programme of Capsule Venice, the Venetian branch of Capsule Shanghai. 

As a curator, she has worked with various institutions, including La Biennale di Venezia (Venice), the Israel Museum (Jerusalem), CAFA Art Museum (Beijing), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), the 2010 Carrara Sculpture Biennale (Carrara), the Chinese Ministry of Culture (Beijing), Three Shadows Photography Art Centre (Beijing), Galleria Continua (Beijing), Galleria Massimo De Carlo (Hong Kong), Cassina Projects (Milan), the 2019 Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism /Architecture (Shenzhen). Her texts have appeared in numerous publications such as Arte e Critica, Artribune, Exibart, AAP, Flash Art International, Frieze, Artforum. For Skira she has curated Zhang Ruyi’s monograph.

Sara Mondini

Sara Mondini

Sara Mondini is an art historian specialised in the artistic productions - both ancient and modern - of South Asia, Middle East and North Africa, and Assistant Professor of Art and Architecture of West and South Asia in the Department of Languages and Cultures at Ghent University. She is currently the Principal Investigator leading the five-year project The Mosques of Kerala: Artistic Vocabularies in the Identity-Building of Muslim Communities (2023-2028), funded by the FWO with an Odysseus Type II grant.

Before joining Ghent University, Dr. Mondini collaborated as Adjunct Professor with various universities: Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, (2009-2023), the FIT-Fashion Institute of Technology of New York at Milan Politecnico, Milan, (2016-2023), the University of Urbino “Carlo Bo” in Italy (2022-2023), and the University of Granada in Spain (2010-2013), where she taught courses on South Asian Visual Culture and Islamic Art and Architecture.

Camilla Querin

Camilla Querin

Camilla Querin is Assistant Professor of Art History at Ohio Wesleyan University. She specializes in modern and contemporary art with a focus on Brazil. Her research, both academic and curatorial, focuses on the intersection of visual arts with politics across the Americas, from the independence movements of the nineteenth century in Latin America to Latinx activist art in the U.S. today.  

She has curated exhibitions and worked in museums in New York and Los Angeles, and earned her doctorate in Art History at the University of California, Riverside, where she was UCR's inaugural Fellow at the California Museum of Photography. She holds a master’s degree in Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and Museum Studies from New York University, and a master’s degree in Economics and Management in Arts, Culture, Media and Entertainment from Bocconi University. Her writings have appeared in “Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture”, “Modos: Revista de História da Arte”, and the “Eaton Journal of Archival Research in Science Fiction".

Maria Redaelli

Maria Redaelli

Maria Redaelli is a post-doc research fellow at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, where in 2022 she obtained a Ph.D. in History of the Arts with a thesis on New Media Art in Russia. At the same university, she acts as coordinator of the scientific secretariat of the Centre for Studies in Russian Art (CSAR). At the CSAR Centre, she co-managed various conferences, talks, and educational programmes. 

Since 2015 she has been assistant at CYLAND Media Art Lab for the exhibitions held at Ca’ Foscari in the framework of the Art Biennials. In 2019 she was assistant curator of the “12 Cyfest. ID. Art: Tech Exhibition” and in 2024 she is playing the same role for “CYFEST 15: Vulnerability”.

She co-curated the exhibition “Cercando il cuore” (Venice, 2023) and worked as assistant curator for the exhibition of Sergey Kischenko “Hortus Conclusus. Memoria Biodiversità Migrazione” (Venice, 2023) and for the exhibition “Uzbekistan: l’Avanguardia nel deserto” (Venice - Florence, 2024).