2006

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“Steirischer herbst does not have a specific theme in 2006 to which all artistic and theoretical aspects must subscribe. There are, however, important leitmotifs, red threads that we will be following, tying events together here and there. Ever and again, the political, social and aesthetic discussions of our time revolve around the techniques of external control and self-control that influences all areas of our lives and art as well as the sometimes utopian, sometimes pragmatic models of collaboration, participation and open sources.”
—Veronica Kaup-Hasler (original booklet translation)

The first year with Veronica Kaup-Hasler as artistic director brought a series of new discourse and theory formats. Kontrolle, Kollaboration, Teilhabe und offene Quellen (Control, Collaboration, Participation, and Open Sources) was the leitmotif examined in the Spielfeldforschung (Playing-Field Research) conference titled Nothing but Control, curated by Gesa Ziemer and Florian Malzacher. The new series Open Ups consisted in the first year of three mini-symposia held in English: Radical Empiricism, Control in Art, Science, and Activism, and An Immoral Offer—Conversation on Collaboration, Participation, and Piracy. The performative conference Wörterbuch des Krieges (War Dictionary) presented one hundred words connected with the topic of war in strict alphabetical order over four days.

A festival center at the Künstlerhaus im Stadtpark, which was specifically redesigned for this purpose by Stephen Craig, concentrated all the festival activities in one place for the first time. For the opening at the Helmut List Halle, the Austrian composer Georg Nussbaumer made various devices clatter with the help of wind machines in his piece Schwerefeld mit Luftabdrücken (Gravitational Field with Air Impressions). “A concert is an installation is a performance,” proclaimed Kaup-Hasler in her preface to the program booklet.

What forms such an interdisciplinary orientation can assume was shown, for instance, in the participation of the Norwegian artist collective Verdensteatret, whose production Concert for Greenland was presented as a theater production in its German premiere at the Dom im Berg, as a concert in the context of musikprotokoll, and also as an installation-based continuation and translation at the Kunsthaus Graz. It was anagrammatically renamed “Gutshaus Kranz,” and for the duration of the project the abysses of retreating into the private sphere were addressed in the constantly changing exhibition Protections (with Tim Etchells, Vlatka Horvat, Christian Jankowski, Daria Martin, Markus Schinwald, and others; curated by Adam Budak and Christine Peters), with architecture by Elmgreen & Dragset.

The international premieres included Armin Petra’s play Tanzen! (Dance!; written under the pseudonym Fritz Kater), an “industrial soap opera,” in which Nicolette Krebitz escapes the control of the neoliberal personnel management of a biotech company through her side job as an exotic dancer, and Nine Years by Lone Twin.

Program