2000

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“It is therefore not primarily a matter of superficial politicization, but also about pinpointing social and political contradictions in the nerve cells of artistic production—with the aim of altering our perception.
The logic of provocation is affected by this. steirischer herbst 2K distances itself from the calculated logic of staged scandals, while explicitly committing itself to challenging and transforming the provocative power of advanced art, established standards, and traditional perceptions.
Sociopolitical sensitizing and a desire for complexity are interwoven in advanced artistic practice as readiness to engage with the new, the foreign, and the unfamiliar.
We invite festival visitors to passionately accompany the artists in controversial confrontations.”
—Peter Oswald (original booklet translation)

Peter Oswald, who took office in 2000, was the second expert on Neue Musik to become the artistic director of steirischer herbst. The first striking aspect of his tenure was the new look of the festival’s printed matter. The new art director, Ecke Bonk, switched from posters with an artist-designed motif to minimalistic graphic design featuring the steirisc[:her:]bst logo. In his introduction to the program booklet for steirischer herbst 2K, Oswald rejected an overarching theme and invoked a “new modernity,” which reconstituted the “dialectical references to political and social contexts that had been denounced by postmodernism.” In addition, he emphatically affirmed the “provocative power of advanced art, established standards, and traditional perception to capture and transform.”

The opening evening in the Waagner-Biró-Halle, which featured the Catalonian performance and action theater group La Fura dels Baus with Wolfgang Mitterer’s composition White Foam, became a high point of steirischer herbst. Other theater evenings followed with the premiere of the play OBS/ESSION. The new version of Dejan Dukovski’s play Das Pulverfass (The Powder Keg) also premiered under the direction of Dimiter Gotscheff at the Schauspielhaus, just as did The Far Side of the Moon, a theater evening by the famous Canadian director Robert Lepage.

In the exhibitions, Oswald focused on big names and a broad impact, including Fashion Will Go Out of Fashion by the inventor of the monokini, Rudi Gernreich, in an exhibition designed by Coop Himmelb(l)au at the Neue Galerie and the show <hers> Video als weibliches Terrain (<Hers> Video as Female Ground), curated by Stella Rollig, at the Landesmuseum Joanneum. With the parties by h2K soundfiles, steirischer herbst also opened itself up further to electronic music that transcends genres and geographic boundaries.

Program