2024

←

→

“Der Zeit ihre Kunst, der Kunst ihre Freiheit.” (To every age its art, to every art its freedom.)
[…]
The Secession’s slogan was militantly anti-nationalist. In a world of new nation-states (to which Austria did not yet belong), states that were already preparing to attack each other in World War I, artists proclaimed time and not space as their territory. Time, which resists property. Time, which is shared. They saw themselves as fellow travelers in time: con-temporary artists.
Today, thinking of time probably produces anxiety, as we are told humanity might have little of it left. So we grab a lifeline: places and territories. Into which we are born, and to which we are tied forever as if by an umbilical cord.
—Ekaterina Degot

In the super election year 2024, in which a resurgent nationalism celebrated poll victories across the world, steirischer herbst questioned concepts such as nation, identity, and roots. Horror Patriae, the seventh festival under Ekaterina Degot, shed light on narratives of the fatherland as well as the horrors (re)emerging from these fictions—not without a sense of humor, of course.

steirischer herbst ’24 already created a stir before it opened, after the setup of Yoshinori Niwa’s installation and durational performance Cleaning a Poster During the Election Period Until It Is No Longer Legible. The artist had created a satirical poster for a fictitious right-wing party that he wanted to wash off until Austria’s national elections, which took place mid-festival. After an anonymous report, it was confiscated by the police (that is, covered with a blue canvas) and investigated for violating the Prohibition Act, the Austrian law that bans (neo-)Nazism and its symbols. The poster’s slogan, Jedem das Unsere! (“To each ours!”), alluded to the motto Jedem das Seine (“To each his own”), used by the Nazis. Within twenty-four hours, the canvas was removed and Niwa could resume his work.

The festival was officially opened in Lesliehof on 19 September, where, following Degot’s traditional speech, Natalia Pschenitschnikova dissected the mysterious Habsburg motto “A.E.I.O.U.” and other abbreviations in a conceptual cantata. At Helmut List Halle, transnational collective La Fleur premiered the performance The Phantom of the Operetta, which explored the sociopolitical context of late Viennese operetta and its contemporary resonances through Emmerich Kálmán.

Like in 2022, a group exhibition in cooperation with Neue Galerie Graz / Universalmuseum Joanneum formed the core of this edition. Unlike A War in the Distance, which placed the Neue Galerie collection into a dialogue with commissions, this show combined artworks and artifacts from various departments of the Universalmuseum Joanneum with works by contemporary artists. In the historical building of Neue Galerie Graz, it imagined an alternative national museum. Split into departments such as the “Heimat Temple” and the “Gallery of Timid Modernity,” the show told stories that—in the tradition of Degot’s directorship—combine local myths and global questions. It examined how the folksy fetishization of the homeland goes hand in hand with imperial gestures.

In the Neue Galerie vestibule, Thomas Hörl’s Ancestral Gallery welcomed visitors, a new large-scale installation about the ambiguity of the Perchten. The customs centering on these mythical Alpine figures were strongly promoted in the Third Reich, an aspect that was also foregrounded in other parts of the exhibition that explicitly dealt with the Pan-German and Nazi influence on Styrian folk culture.

Pablo Bronstein dealt with Graz’s architectural history in his installation A Celebration of the Historical Evolution of the Local (Graz, Austria) Architectural Polemic. A giant cake and a series of psychedelic posters illustrated the rivalry between national, classicist, and (later) postmodern styles reflected in the cityscape. Another commission in the same room, Marko Tadić’s installation Prevented Landscapes with overpainted postcards, also addressed historical cityscapes and the conflicts visible in them.

New video works were placed between the exhibition’s chapters. Jan Peter Hammer, for instance, went to the bottom of an archeological myth in his documentary Noreia. In the 1920s, state archeologist Walter Schmid claimed to have discovered the remains of a Celtic metropolis in a small Styrian village. Hammer’s film shed light on the repercussions of this bogus discovery, which can be felt up to the present. In her video Voices, Ieva Epnere staged a Graz choir dedicated to Latvian folk music amid Styrian landmarks and mountainscapes—defamiliarizing and complicating questions of identity and culture.

Yet, Horror Patriae not only focused on the Styrian Heimat and the Austrian nation. Numerous works dealt with the exhibition’s topics in other geopolitical contexts. Alina Kleytman’s parodic tourist video The Place to See Before You Die advertised a trip to the artist’s home city, Kharkiv, ravaged by the Russo-Ukrainian War. Assaf Gruber’s poetic short Miraculous Accident told of an Arab–Jewish love story at the Łódź Film School in 1968. With Roee Rosen’s photo series Gaza War Tattoos, visitors caught up with the present state of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

Next to the large group show at Neue Galerie Graz, there was also a smaller exhibition at Forum Stadtpark. Based on archival materials, Kunst Heimat Kunst Revisited explored the thematically related exhibition series Kunst Heimat Kunst (1992–94) curated by Werner Fenz. The opening weekend also saw the premiere of Clara Ianni’s Resurrection, for which the artist had received the Werner Fenz Grant for Art in Public Space, jointly awarded by steirischer herbst and the City of Graz for the first time. This performance focused on discarded theater props and backdrops representing nature.

Besides numerous premieres throughout the festival, visitors could see two new performances on the final weekend of steirischer herbst ’24: Thomas Verstraeten invited people on a hike through fashion store Kastner & Öhler, which he had transformed into an artificial mountain landscape. For the festival finale, Felix Hafner and his ensemble reflected on folk culture and internationality, authenticity and self-exoticization at their Volksliederabend in Addis Abeba (Evening of Folk Songs in Addis Ababa).

Next to exhibitions and performances, Horror Patriae also comprised the by now well-established herbst cabaret and a comprehensive herbst education program. The 2024 discursive program took place, among others, in the shape of herbst deathmatches—competitive debates—while the herbst bar became a herbst café. As usual, ORF musikprotokoll and Out of Joint were also part of the program, as was the Partner Program with performances and exhibitions by institutions and initiatives from Graz and Styria. The group exhibition at Neue Galerie Graz remained open through February 2025 and ended with a symposium on Uncomfortable Voices.

Program