2010

←

→

“This year’s steirischer herbst theme plays with all of these aspects of virtuosity, although not all of the artistic works need make direct, obvious reference to them. It is the general frame within which the numerous exhibitions, performances and theory events place their own emphasis and thus complement each other—sometimes intentionally, sometimes surprisingly.”
—Veronica Kaup-Hasler (original booklet translation)

Under the leitmotif Virtuosity, steirischer herbst ’10 examined the spectrum of interpretations ranging from the mastery of an instrument, which has fallen into discredit in the modern period, and the virtuosity of tricksters and pickpockets to Paolo Virno’s reinterpretation of the notion as a necessity and normality when uniting work, private life, and social aspects.

This year the nomadic festival center returned to the Forum Stadtpark (designed by the young Austrian architecture team feld72), where a Casino of Tricks was set up over eight days, along with the film and sound archive Flight Case Archive by Hannah Hurtzig / Mobile Akademie and the two-day Conference on Virtuosity as a Strategy for Art and Survival(curated by Florian Malzacher and Sibylle Peters), with a closing lecture by Friedrich Kittler.

The more conventional meaning of virtuosity was reflected in the choreographies This Is How You Will Disappear by Gisèle Vienne and I Don’t Believe in Outer Space by William Forsythe as well as in the marathon performance by the pianist Marino Formenti and music by the Arditti Quartet and the Klangforum Wien as part of musikprotokoll.

In addition to solo exhibitions by Franz West at the Kunsthaus and Matts Leiderstam at the Grazer Kunstverein, the second part of Utopie und Monument (Utopia and Monument), Über die Virtuosität des Öffentlichen (On Virtuosity and the Public Sphere), examined the potential of public space as a “space of appearance” (Hannah Arendt), with commissioned works by artists including Kader Attia, Andrea Fraser, Isa Genzken, John Knight, and the Kooperative für Darstellungspolitik.

Program