Where Are We Now? Retrospective Views, Presentiments & Departures into the Unknown, steirischer herbst 2017, various venues, Graz

“They (the Nazis) were back. And they went as far as they were allowed to go. Within a couple of years, they had infiltrated parts of public life. In secret. Or, better: semi-publicly. My grandfather, the architect Fritz Haas, was one of the key characters of the veteran Nazi scene in Graz.”¹ This was part of the official speech at the anniversary ceremony by the composer Georg Friedrich Haas, titled “steirischer herbst: Or, Why Europe’s oldest new art festival must take place in Styria of all places”. He witnessed and very precisely laid out the clandestine political, cultural, and economic structures carrying this mindset further in Graz (1938, deemed the “City of the Popular Uprising”) and the Province of Styria. The haunting past surfaces in different intervals and intensities. This awareness underpins the leitmotif of the festival’s fiftieth edition. It is the last one for Veronica Kaup-Hasler, the artistic director of the last twelve years, who asks “Where Are We Now?” for a positioning followed by a lookout for a cartography of a different now.

The festival’s headquarters have become this year’s festival centre. The baroque Palais Attems, since 1985 a site for conceptualizing, organizing, and administrating, opened its doors to different formats and productions, to artists and guests in general. The courtyard was hightlighted by the lit-up wooden sculpture “Transegrity” (2017) by the Graz-based Studio Magic, which referred to the “Czech hedgehog”, since World War II a common war defence structure and a play on the term avant-garde. On the festivals centre’s third floor, Walid Raad offered walkthroughs of his installation titled “Kicking the Dead” (2017): artificial ancient sculptures with(out) shadows, William Morris wallpaper panels with corporate signs and prominent heads, or empty but painted crates for artworks. His lecture performance investigated current situations and precise spaces in the Arab or Islamic world and the West, so as to unveil their ideological, economic, cultural, and political entanglements. Different concepts of the invisible and truth meander in the narration framed by Jack, a World War II veteran. Focusing on modes of resistance to accepting simple conceptions of the world and hegemonic positions, the festival centre upholds its tradition by additionally offering numerous discursive formats experimenting with decentralized dynamics.

Putting its own history up for discussion, a co-produced retrospective was hosted at Graz-Museum by the name of “Diese Wildnis hat Kultur: 50 × steirischer herbst” (This Wilderness Has Culture), a phrase by Jörg Schlick, featuring materials selected from the festival’s archive. Wooden structures developed for facsimiles of archival documents integrate elements taken from the streets, such as rotating billboards, advertising columns, or a telephone booth, which suggest a language of resistance to a policy of museumization and a cult of relics. A chronological structure, starting with 1967, marks one event per year with a meaningful but subjective narrative restraining from the selection of best of scandals or triumphs.

The festival’s group exhibition “Prometheus Unbound”, curated by Luigi Fassi at the Neue Galerie, used the mythological bringer of culture to serve as climax and anti-climax to fighting the European project of modernism (eurocentrism) and Western practices of cultural hegemony (identity politics) by bringing together six positions. The inscribed words “fetishized, treasured, subtitled, classified, disposed …” of the small slide show titled “Unsettled Objects” (1968–69) named the precarious status of belonging of the photographed uprooted and museumized objects taken from non-Western cultures. Jonathas de Andrade posited racial catchwords from the UNESCO study “Race and Class” in Rural Brazil (1952) in relation to different forms of black-and-white portrait photographs of Brazilians in his installation “Eu, mestiço” (Me, a Mestizo, 2017). The work “P. O.V. (Point of View)” (2016) by Clemens von Wedemeyer, in turn, investigated the 16mm film material by cavalry captain Freiherr Harald von Vietinghoff- Riesch, an amateur film-maker who had permission to film behind the scenes in war zones during World War II (1938–41). The six chapters of reworked archival film material offered an extensive analysis of the war’s protagonists and victims by concurrently revealing much of the film-maker’s ideological mindset. In the performance project by Aimée Zito Lema called “Rond de Jambe” (2017), a video installation and the actual staging of a choreography of resistance, drawn from archival imagery and with local amateur dancers, rounded off the show. Indeed, the curatorial gesture put the unbound Prometheus onto the streets. Artistic practices of re-visiting, re-appropriating, and re-working visual material allowed historical and contemporary forms of colonialism, nationalism, fascism, and racism to unfold.

Since its very beginnings, but with different intensities, the festival has collaborated with art institutions in Graz. Here the leitmotif asks for a reconsideration of the respective institutional functions and related history. How can an intertwining of a cultural landscape in regard to and in cooperation with the festival be mapped? And how is this manifested in exhibitions?

Again 1967. The political climate evoked a struggle for visibility and the drive not to accept the narrow-mindedness of a bourgeois and conservative Graz demonstrated in a special edition of “trigon”. The third trinational biennial between Austria, former Yugoslavia, and Italy took place at the Künstlerhaus (currently the Halle für Kunst & Medien), investigating contemporary architecture and art in relation to the perception of space supported by utopian ideas. This provocative milestone caused a public outcry: its political supporters were asked to resign and numerous letters were written to the editor of the local newspaper. All of this was taken up in “trigon 67/17: ambiente nuovo / post environment” curated by Sandro Droschl and Jürgen Dehm, who unfolded objects from the original show along with film and photo documentation and press material on one floor. Works by fifteen contemporary artists from the same geographical area responded on the main floor and the surrounding public space, negotiating spatial architecture and the historical canon of sculptural work. The show relates thematically and timewise to “Graz Architektur” (Graz Architecture) at Kunsthaus Graz by curator (and director) Barbara Steiner. She built the focus of a group of local architects from the trigon generation, who had a direct relation to Peter Cook and Colin Fournier, the Kunsthaus architects. The show “Auf ins Ungewisse” (Up into the Unknown) on the second floor then considered the process of realization of the physical space itself, laying it out as a dispositif.

But the festival’s leitmotif also invited institutions to rethink programming with a political agenda through countless crises in the world and in front of one’s own doorstep. For the two-part serial exhibition “Scharfstellen” (To Focus), Anton Lederer and Margarethe Makovec invited twelve artists who have formed < rotor >’s programmatic thinking since 1999. Part one took widespread concerns around normative and homogenizing identity politics, new nationalisms, colonialism, global warming, and hostility to democracy and encouraged visitors to think anew about characteristics of engaged art and about being in the world with an ethical call to joint responsibility.

A long and intertwined history has tied Camera Austria and steirischer herbst together: collaborations began in 1975 with Manfred Willmann’s fotogalerie im Forum Stadtpark, and from 1996 to 1999 Christine Frisinghelli was the festival’s artistic director. For this year’s iteration, Camera Austria opened its archive to Özlem Altin and has positioned her project between the two-part exhibition “Un-Curating the Archive”—which marks the beginning of archival work by making it public in its entirety. Altin transformed the gallery space into a stage in order to perform her approach to visual material: images have been (re-)photographed, blurred, fragmented, juxtaposed, laid down, layered, overpainted. She works against a standstill in documentation and intervenes against inscribed meaning to constantly develop the narrative anew.

The continuous reworking is the common thread leading to “The Seed Eaters” (2017) by Emily Mast at Grazer Kunstverein: an experimental play with thirty-five small scenes written to be performed by the audience in an exhibition with eighteen playful stage sets. Surreal moments of powerlessness accompany the performers’ emphatic feelings that arise out of the ordinary and in between numerous beginnings and endings. Here, the commission is part of a larger annual programme relating to the publication Von der Notwendigkeit der Kunst (From the Necessity of Art, 1959) by Ernst Fischer (1899– 1972), a writer and socialist partly based in Graz, who in 1934 fled Austrofascism and became a communist.

Already these brief insights into institutional coproductions with the festival in 2017 signify interest and urge local narratives to be reassessed against the backdrop of the current state of affairs, collectively working against falling into oblivion. Hegemonic narratives are fostered by heterogeneous institutional practices ranging from performative curatorial gestures to collective approaches, which invite a self-perception of the audience as agents.

The audience literally became actors in the central production of the festival, which commissioned one of its biggest projects ever since: the performance collective Nature Theater of Oklahoma (NTO) translated Elfriede Jelinek’s Nobel Prize-winning novel Die Kinder der Toten (1995, Children of the Dead) into a filmic project. The struggle against fascism and the oppression of the Holocaust in Austria runs through the 666-page prose; and the NTO developed live performances with amateur actors and captured the scenes on 666 rolls of Super 8 film. The book’s showplaces in Neuberg an der Mürz (Upper Styria), with its rich history, act as backbone for Jelinek’s undead who want to reassert their place in the collective memory from which they are being expelled. One might thus suggest that the festival’s visual art productions and collaborations placed emphasis on artistic practices along the lines of Boris Buden’s warning: “… it is not a question of what in our social reality resembles fascism from the past, but rather what deceives us into failing to recognize its coming from the future.”²