When all of Austria knows that the pro-Russian far-right has achieved a historic victory in the general elections, a fictitious electoral poster remains standing in the center of Graz, the country’s second largest city. The work, created by the Japanese artist Yoshinori Niwa for the Steirischer Herbst festival, which runs until October 13 in the city, was initially covered by the police because it seemed suspected of violating the Austrian law combating Nazism. The false candidate promises zero tolerance with a sausage in his hand and reproduces a slogan copied from the motto “To each what he deserves”, forged on the iron gate of the Buchenwald concentration camp. Its aesthetic imitates the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ), archenemy of the avant-garde festival, which has demanded the suspension of its public financing.
The prosecution soon closed the case and the police uncovered the poster again. The Steirischer Herbst (Styrian Autumn) was born in 1968 with a marked political accent and has premiered original works by authors such as Samuel Beckett, Julio Cortázar, Peter Handke and Elfriede Jelinek. The performance of Niwa included the daily washing of the poster so that it would arrive faded, white, empty of content, on election day. And there the entire contest will continue.
The festival is directed by a Russian exile, Ekaterina Degot (Moscow, 1958), who prospered as an art historian in the hard years of the Soviet Union and directed the state Tretjakow gallery in Moscow in the 1980s, during Perestroika. A fierce opponent of Putin’s regime, she recently stated that she longed for the Cold War. He left Russia in 2014 to direct the World Academy of Arts in Cologne and in 2018 took over the directorate in Graz. “Yoshinori Niwa’s satirical work is an example of how culture can respond to far-right politics,” says Degot at the door of the Neue Galerie Graz, who also serves as chief curator and agent provocateur: “What would happen to me if I returned to Moscow? Have you read the press, do you follow the news? Do you think a bear would attack me? “Putin’s regime would put me in jail.”
The main exhibition that structures and gives title to the 57th edition of the festival is Homeland Horror (until February 16, 2025). The exhibition builds a fictional museum in the Neue Galerie Graz that mocks the myths that romanticize national history. All nation-states are an invention and so are their museums. This exhibits works commissioned from 17 contemporary artists and pieces on loan from the Universalmuseum Joanneum, founded in 1811.
The multidisciplinary artist, filmmaker and writer Roee Rosen (1963, Rehovot, Israel) has traveled from Tel Aviv to present Tattoos of the Gaza wara photographic series of bodies made up with tattoos, among them, one where it reads Total victorythe motto that Netanyahu repeats in every operation in Gaza. A tattoo is a stigma for both ultra-Orthodox Jewish settlers and Hamas militants. “I can’t make art about what’s happening in Gaza,” Rosen responded to the curators’ initial request. The artist knew that he would be attacked from all prisms: “Criticism of Israel marks me as a traitor for some Zionists, although the work can be accused of whitewashing the image of Israel’s crimes, of capitalizing on the horrors of war or even appropriating Palestinian pain.”
“Israel changed ontologically after the horrendous terrorist attack of October 7, 2023,” he says in Graz. “The current war is not only a much more systemic and massive slaughter, with more than 40,000 dead, but also unprecedented destruction, bombings of hospitals and universities, expulsions, food deprivation (as well as the intensification of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and acts of state terrorism in Lebanon). Perhaps the political map does not reflect the will of the Israeli electorate, but it nonetheless features a convicted messianic terrorist as Interior Minister. That is, a criminal in charge of the law.”
Rosen decided to express that ontological shift, the change in what it means to be Israeli, through his series of tattoos. One of them, The terrible Dreidel, a military historical poem, “it’s a poem written with the names that the Israeli army gave to its assault operations in Gaza in the current century. “It shows the incredible corruption of language: attacks of destruction and murder under pastoral names, some even taken from children’s songs.”
Of the 17 artists who have participated in Homeland Horrorthree are Ukrainian: Nikolay Karabinovych, who lives in Antwerp and has shot the film in 21-minute 4K format The latest work of art about war. Alina Kleytman, who lives in Turin and is showing the film in 4K The place you must see before you diea “hysterical realism” parody of the Russian army’s destruction of his hometown, Kharkiv, shown among ruins with a voice-over. off that promotes a tourist space. And the multimedia artist Sergey Bratkov, who also works with HD video in Wiepersdorf (for artist friends). Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Bratkov left Moscow, where he was a teacher at the Rodchenko Art School, and moved to Berlin with the help of the Artists at Risk program (Artists at risk).
In the “Chamber of Unlikely Patriots” of the fictional museum, the real photos that Hertha Hurnaus took of the Upper Austrian estate of Thomas Bernhard are rescued, in principle the opposite of a patriot, the writer who never tired of flaying the dark side of his country until he rose as public enemy number one. After his death, it was learned that he had transformed his residence into an eccentric and obsessive scale reproduction of Austria, typical of the archetype of the Austrian rural lord—including the hunting rifles. “Was his anger really a form of patriotism?” they ask at the museum.
In addition to the star exhibition, the festival has scheduled theater, music and debates until October 13 in Graz, Austria’s second city, governed by the Communist Party since 2021.
The French musician and composer Augustin Maurs defended the recital Out of tune: favorite songs of dictators and political leaders with a repertoire that “is about love.” Maurs highlights the melancholy in a biting musical parody that makes us imagine North Korean leader Kim Jong-un dancing Brother Louie, of Modern Talking, or the Serbian Slobodan Milosevic listening repeatedly on his walkman My Wayby Frank Sinatra, while he was tried for genocide and war crimes by the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Accompanied by piano and drums, the atmosphere conceived is that of a cabaret, but before a very beautiful interpretation of Blutrote Rosenby Austin Egen, Hitler’s favorite song, the audience at the Orpheum in Graz does not applaud. Not because he doesn’t like it, but because of the tense uncertainty, which lasts for a few moments, of considering it appropriate.
These leaders must be recognized for their good taste. And to Maurs, the virtuosity of his arrangements and the ability to capture and display the most sentimental – at times vulnerable – side of an established cast of tyrants.
The La Fleur collective, directed by Monika Gintersdorfer, premiered The Phantom of the Operettawhich follows the trail of the Hungarian composer Emmerich Kálmán, of Jewish origin, one of Hitler’s most esteemed musicians. Some of his operettas were performed in Vienna in more than thirty thousand performances. After the Anschluss, he was tempted to become an honorary Aryan, but chose to escape and settle on Broadway.
“La Fleur embodies everything that the extreme right doesn’t like, we are their nightmare,” says Gintersdorfer in the dressing rooms of the Helmut List Halle auditorium after the performance. “We do not represent a single national culture. We speak different languages on stage. We have presented a new transnational operetta mix. Deep down, there are similarities with Kálmán. “When the Nazis came, his connection with Josephine Baker and jazz disappeared from the scene.” And he warns: “We are in a very dangerous political moment in Europe. In the theater and cultural festivals it has not yet been seen, because the personnel who are hiring us are still in their position, but if the trend continues its course we will see it in two or three years.
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