The Altmarkkreis Salzwedel Adult Education Centre and the Association for the Promotion of the Artists’ and Scholars’ House invited guests to the Artists’ Café on 18 December 2025. Over coffee, tea and light refreshments, current scholarship holder Johannes Weilandt gave interested guests an insight into his art and his life.
Johannes Weilandt lives and works in Berlin and Halle Saale. He studied fine art / stage and costume design at the Weißensee Academy of Art Berlin and the University of Fine Arts Belgrade. His serial drawings are usually preceded by intensive research in medical history collections and archives. Of central importance to him is the critical examination of the institutionalisation of the human body and the associated questions of representational ethics.
During his scholarship stay at the Artists’ and Scholarship House in Salzwedel, visual artist Johannes Weilandt explored the so-called ‘Gall’s skull theory’ based on his drawings of a skull specimen from the Meckel Collections of the Institute of Anatomy and Cell Biology at MLU Halle-Wittenberg. Named after the German physician Franz Josef Gall (1758-1828), this theory claimed to be able to determine a person’s disposition and character based purely on external characteristics.
For the Artist Café, Weilandt vividly presented and explained the process of his critical, artistic examination of the devastating consequences of this doctrine, which has since been scientifically disproved. Using examples from his earlier and current work, he also spoke about the method and significance of artistic research for his drawing practice. @_AMK
Some interested guests accepted the invitation to the artists’ café.