Esben Weile Kjær / Laila Shawa

From July 26 to September 14, Salzburger Kunstverein proudly presents two new exhibitions that continue the institution’s 2025 program Picturing Justice. ​​

Laila Shawa: School of Seeing
Curated by Jakub Gawkowski.
Studio

The first exhibition of Laila Shawa’s (1940-2022) work in Austria revisits a formative chapter in her life: her studies at Oskar Kokoschka’s “School of Seeing” in Salzburg (1960–63). While referring to this brief moment, this exhibition takes Salzburg as a departure point, not a destination: one moment in Shawa’s transnational trajectory that spanned Gaza, Rome, Cairo, and London.

Fusing Islamic ornament and calligraphy with pop aesthetics, Persian miniature with graffiti, Shawa’s work operates in a mode sometimes described as Islamo-pop. Her works expose the intersecting systems of power that shaped bodies, narratives, and visibility itself.

Her art was inseparable from public engagement. Yet, as Shawa herself stated, an artist’s responsibility ends once the work leaves the studio: “It takes on a life of its own and how it is perceived depends more on the makeup of the viewer than the intent of the creator.” In this sense, the “school of seeing” becomes not about the pedagogy of form, but about the ethics of perception.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a series of workshops devised to cultivate a differentiated gaze—one that resists singular narratives and rehearsed perceptions. Full details to follow.

Esben Weile Kjær: thousands of small explosions at the same time
Curated by Mirela Baciak.
Grand Hall

Esben Weile Kjær practice operates within the logic of contemporary Western self-optimization, high-gloss desire, and the relentless pursuit of aesthetic perfection. In this exhibition, Weile Kjær mirrors a contemporaneity obsessed with visibility, display, and endless surface manipulation. It thrives in the hyper-now, reflecting the quiet violence of neoliberal self-surveillance, where submission can be mistaken for empowerment. His new installation for Salzburger Kunstverein collapses Rococo decadence into digital overstimulation, producing an uncanny landscape where the body is both a commodity and an avatar.

Alongside the exhibition, Weile Kjær stages DEEPFAKE, a performance that utilizes the Salzburg Festival’s costume archive as a stage of glitchy déjà vu. Historic garments are worn and looped through by performers trained in physical theatre, mimicking the repetition and absurdity of meme culture. Set within the exhibition landscape, the piece stages the body as an unstable interface—shifting between roles, eras, and affective registers. Here, identity is in flux, history is a loop, and justice is a moving target.

The exhibition is kindly supported by the Danish Arts Foundation.

Opening of both exhibitions: July 25, 2025, 8pm

Artist talk: “poptimism” July 25, 2025, 7pm
Esben Weile Kjær, Jakub Gawkowski, Mirela Baciak in conversation with Greta Rainbow (Writer-in-Residence SKV x Spike). In collaboration with the Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts.

Although at first glance, the pairing of Laila Shawa (1940–2022) and contemporary artist Esben Weile Kjær may seem almost deliberately improbable—a dialogue across not just time, but cultural, political, and aesthetic registers, both artists operate on the terrain of bodies as surfaces under pressure: trained, adorned, fragmented, repurposed. The talk led by the writer-in-residence Greta Rainbow focuses on the label and the reality of “pop” and “optimism” as they appear in both Laila Shawa’s and Esben Weile Kjær’s exhibitions at Salzburger Kunstverein. Where and how does pop fit into the artists’ critiques of hegemony?

Followed by the performance DEEPFAKE at 9pm by Esben Weile Kjær co-produced with Salzburger Festspiele.

The performance DEEPFAKE will also be shown as part of the Salzburg Festival Opening Festivities on July 19 at 5:30pm, 7:30pm and 9pm.