Lecturer:           Professor Gottfried Hoellwarth (Vienna, Austria)

                           University of Art and Design, Linz

                           Institute of Fine Arts and Cultural Theory

Seminar Report:           The Arts – Therapy of the 21C Cultural Cord

Ladies and Gentlemen!

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak to you here in Seoul. For me, the sculptor, and my wife, the paintress Isolde Joham, it is a special honour to be guests of the 14^th Seoul Art Festival. Thank you very much.

I am happy to see so many friends again here and to have the opportunity to meet many interesting fellow artists from all over the world and make friends with them – which leads us right to the subject of the exhibition, PEACE THROUGH FRIENDSHIP.

The subject of the seminar today is a completely different one, however: The Arts - Therapy in the Cultural Context of the 21^st Century.

The central question is always: What is a dream and what is reality?

Dreams are windows to the soul … But how can we interpret these messages?

Only by translating these dream messages into pictures can we get a feeling and an idea about their meaning. The artist is the translator of dream language.

Yes, my friends: Many artists are translators translating the language of dreams into imagery.

We find innumerable examples in the history of art: I will only mention Edvard Munch, William Blake, Alfred Kubin and Francisco de Goya.

But now I would like to present examples from the current exhibition “Traum und Trauma (Dream and Trauma)” at the Museumsquartier in Vienna:

Pictures from the exhibition:

..

The motto of the Vienna exhibition points to the importance of this translating work from the language of the soul into a language of cognizable pictures. The following statement of Nobel laureate Elias Canetti is posted at the entrance of the exhibition:

“Everything you forget cries for help in your dreams”.

Thank you, and live out your dreams.

Gottfried Hoellwarth)