Horror Patriae: Exhibition

20.9.24–16.2.25
Neue Galerie Graz

National museums are haunted houses. Established by empires and states that have long since ceased to exist, they served to construct and confirm national myths. Even if the world is constantly changing, former delusions of grandeur and petty grievances of the past are often still at play there.

The exhibition Horror Patriae is a centerpiece of steirischer herbst ’24. It examines a darker side of patriotism in all its forms, all over the world. Its venue is the historical building of the Joanneum (today Universalmuseum Joanneum). Founded in 1811 as an Enlightenment-era museum with an educational function, the Joanneum was the center of what historian Benedict Anderson calls an “imagined community.” As Anderson argues in his inspirational book of the same name, all nation-states as we know them are inventions, works of collective imagination by the educated class. Museums, as well as novels, newspapers, and theater plays, are sites of these construction works.

In this world of imaginary states, the one the Joanneum represented was especially ephemeral: Styria was a province rather than a state, although at some point in history, during the Renaissance, Graz was the capital of a territory called Inner Austria that included parts of current Italy and Slovenia. The museum’s founder, Archduke Johann (1782–1859), strongly promoted local patriotism over the even vaguer identity of a large multiethnic empire. Still, in a surprisingly universalist way of thinking, he stressed the necessity of learning from all countries—notably in the area of crafts and technologies—and structured the museum as a catalog of achievements worthy of study.

The Joanneum’s later history was all about tensions between the local and the cosmopolitan. It saw the institution become a prestigious “high art” museum in the 1880s and, in 1913, open a department of everyday rural life. It witnessed, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the museum’s turn to Pan-Germanism, which facilitated the Anschluss and, in the 1950s, the paradoxical revival of Inner Austria, this time as a purely imaginary alliance.

Referring to these histories and many others local and international, Horror Patriae imagines an alternative museum of national complexes and perverse imaginaries. The exhibition combines works and artifacts from the Universalmuseum Joanneum’s various collections with works by contemporary artists and is organized into several fictitious departments. Is this museum of dysfunctional and contradictory nationhood the only way to imagine a national museum in a time like ours, when patriotic sentiments are getting good press, even if they have a darker side?

Curated by Ekaterina Degot, David Riff, Gábor Thury, and Pieternel Vermoortel, assisted by Beatrice Forchini and Tobias Ihl

Consultants: Ulrich Becker, Ulrike Hausl-Hoffstätter, Eva Maria Hois, Herwig G. Höller, Günther Holler-Schuster, Birgit Johler, Karin Leitner-Ruhe, David Nayer, Wolfgang Paill, Barbara Porod, Barbara Seyerl

A cooperation between steirischer herbst ’24 and Neue Galerie Graz / Universalmuseum Joanneum