ZHdK Summer School 2026 – Encounters with Taste: Arts, Food, and Political Ecology
Encounters with Taste: Arts, Food, and Political Ecology | 28–30 August 2026. Open Call for “Baustein 12” at the Summer School 2026 Continuing Education, Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK)
Application deadline: August 7, 2026
Modules: CHF 850 per module (CHF 800 with Netzhdk membership).
Organization: Dr Ronald Kolb.
For inquiries: ronald.kolb@zhdk.ch
This Summer School explores food and taste as aesthetic, social, and political practices within contemporary art and curating. Moving between art-historical references and current artistic positions, it investigates how culinary practices have been mobilized as artistic strategies to address questions of sustainability, care, community, global politics and ecological responsibility. Understanding the culinary as a form of social and relational practice, the course examines food not only as material or medium, but as a site where power relations, knowledge systems, and cultural imaginaries intersect and political dimensions of food production and distribution, including global supply chains, extractivism, neocolonial continuities may be made visible by artistic practices that critically intervene in these structures. Historical and contemporary case studies will be discussed to highlight the potentials and ambivalences of working with food in artistic contexts, foregrounding questions of ethics, sustainability, and situated practice.
Through theory sessions, case studies, artistic examples, collaborative formats, and culinary experiences, the Summer School offers participants critical tools to engage with food as an artistic, ecological, and political field of practice.
We will visit art institutions and projects in Zurich, please bring adequate clothing. The course is in English.
Target audience Curators and artists, researchers, designers, architects, art mediators, cultural producers, chefs, transdisciplinary practitioners, and professionals working at the intersection of art, ecology, and the social.
Dr Ronald Kolb (PhD), Continuing Education ZHdK is Artistic Director of M.1 at the Arthur Boskamp-Stiftung in Hohenlockstedt for the 2025/26 cycle. He critically examines contemporary exhibitionary practices from a governmental perspective and explores their dynamics between representational power and participatory operations in both global and situated contexts. A characteristic feature of his practice is the orchestration of exhibiting and teaching as an exercise in participation in contexts of situated knowledges. This is also evident in the international symposia and workshops he has co-organized, such as Situated Knowledges, a digital event with Tai Kwun Contemporary, HK and the Migros Museum (2021), the Summer School “Commoning Curatorial and Artistic Education” at documenta fifteen (2022) and the workshop Commoning Collective Care in collaboration with TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (2023) and the experimental study trip “Post-/Exhibitionary Practices: Art and Curating in Expanded Ecological Thought” with local art practioners in Córdoba, Spain (2024).
Image credits: Seraina Grupp, Taste Library, in: Art as Ecological Practice, Summer Assembly, 11 July 2025. Photo: Marie-Theres Böhmker.