Meeting — April 19, 2026: Maren Götzmann & General Discussion
Artist Presentation: Maren Götzmann
Maren Götzmann, a Brisbane and Berlin based visual artist, presented her practice. She works across drawing, printmaking, artist books, and textiles. Her practice explores concepts of dis/placement, migration, and the positioning of humans within the world. She often works in collaboration with other artists to critique an art market that frequently focuses on individual success and commercial value.
She trained in Munich and completed a second arts degree in Australia after migrating in 1991.
Her central recurring theme is belonging and standpoint — how people position themselves geographically, culturally, and philosophically, particularly as someone who has moved between countries. She referenced the German concept of Heimat as a recurring subject.
Key works included Lifelines (hand-stitched appliqués), Touched (2020 — a quilt made from intimate clothing contributed by female friends, several of whom had since died), Berlin Diaries (2014–ongoing — daily visual diary entries combining print, watercolour, and collage), and Standlines/Standpoints (a performance-based work where she photographs herself within a circle of silk string to mark her position wherever she is).
She also presented Night Letters, a collective of five artists who collaborate weekly on artist books — each member working into the others' pages sequentially, without ownership of individual contributions. The process requires leaving ego at the door. The collective shows every two years, a sustainable rhythm they have maintained for many years.
A full article on Maren's presentation will follow.
Instagram: @marengotzmann8
General Discussion — Art, Audiences, and Marketing
The presentation opened into a wider conversation about the relationship between artists and their audiences.
Most people, even those who are curious, have no framework for understanding contemporary art. They default to what they learned in school, or to the most extreme media examples — a banana selling for a million euros, with no explanation of why. Artists mostly reach other artists, not the general public — not because the work lacks value, but because the general public has rarely been given tools to engage with it.
One member (a photographer) described being confronted on the street while photographing mundane subjects, and watching a stranger's reaction shift from confusion to something resembling recognition — but noted this rarely leads to a sustained relationship with the work.
The conversation touched on the difference between understanding and articulation: artists do not fully understand what they make either, but they can locate the question in the work and speak about it. That ability to articulate the unknown, rather than to explain the known, is perhaps the defining skill.
River made a point that resonated widely: the more particular and specific an artist's focus, the more universal it becomes. Attempts to universalise in order to reach more people often have the opposite effect — making work feel generic and less interesting to algorithms and humans alike. This requires becoming comfortable with being misunderstood at scale, including by bots.
A non-artist member of the group (from Gothenburg) offered an audience perspective: what draws her to follow an artist is a resonance she cannot fully explain, followed by wanting to see more. She also observed that irregular posting causes audiences to disengage. Virtual exhibitions were noted as often more accessible than physical ones due to cost and geography; collaborative pages or group exhibitions, where different artists contribute, can maintain continuity without overburdening any individual.
One member suggested that if several VSG members took Gabriella's workshop together, they could experiment with collaborative posting — sharing the production load across multiple artists, each contributing to a shared page, so no single person has to feed the algorithm alone. Gotza mentioned already doing something similar on the Belgrade Artists in Residence page, where asking past residents to share memories and photos had attracted an unusually engaged local audience.
Arts Funding and Education — International Perspectives
A longer discussion arose around the structural conditions for art in different countries.
In Australia, arts coverage in mainstream media is minimal compared to sport. Public art funding through the Australia Council and state agencies has been significantly cut over the past decade, with no sign of reversal. Commercial galleries are closing — partly due to COVID, but primarily due to reduced disposable income among buyers. Brisbane, with 2.5 million people, now effectively has one public art gallery, after three university-affiliated galleries closed due to funding cuts.
In Germany, the Berlin arts budget has been cut by one third in the past year — significant for a city that has long positioned itself as a global cultural hub.
In Serbia, art is present in the school curriculum but treated as peripheral, with science and other subjects considered more important. Access to exhibitions in smaller cities or countries with fewer institutions remains limited.
The broader point made was that arts education at an early age is foundational to building audiences and cultural literacy. Without it, the general public lacks even the vocabulary to engage with contemporary art — which connects directly to the earlier discussion about why artists mostly reach other artists.
This summary was generated from a session transcript using AI. Some details of who said what may be inaccurate, as speaker attribution was not always clear from the transcript.