Freiheitsplatz, Graz: there’s a voice in my head. She says the statue towering above is Emperor Franz I of Austria. The square bore his name until November 12, 1918, when the Austrian Republic was proclaimed there, and it became Freiheitsplatz. That was only one of its many rebrandings: during the fascist era, it was changed back to Franzenplatz in 1934. Then, after Germany’s annexation of Austria, the Nazis restored it to Freiheitsplatz in 1938. These shifting historical tides set the stage for Freiheitsplatz, a participatory audio work by the performance collective LIGNA. Through headphones, a silken voice suggests the square had been co-opted for two conflicting ideas of freedom. For the Nazis, it meant being released from the tyranny of an invented enemy; for democrats, freedom was to be found in interdependence. True freedom, the voice insists, lies in our relationships with each other.
This conceit felt at odds with the actual mechanics of the performance: sometimes awkwardly, sometimes artfully so. For the most part, I was free to look on as the other participants on the square obeyed an invisible Führer*in’s orders to dance, raise fists, and chant “Freiheit! Freiheit! Freiheit!”. Only when she commanded them to seek out partners did I feel pinned down by the others’ gazes, shame compelling me to participate. Needless to say, I was relieved when the piece guided us into the adjacent theater, where dimmed lights reduced the audience to a sparkling sea of headphone LEDs. The historical tensions evoked by LIGNA’s performance were soon echoed in the opening address by steirischer herbst’s director, Ekaterina Degot. Chief among her concerns were the ways in which historical memory is increasingly being instrumentalized to justify contemporary atrocities—by Putin in Ukraine and Netanyahu in Palestine, though not only them. Meanwhile, the lessons learned in the aftermath of World War II seem to be quietly, but certainly, slipping away.
Fig.1
Degot’s address left many with a sense of looming catastrophe, so it was hardly surprising that visitors welcomed the comic relief of Ivo Dimchev’s Hot Sotz at the Helmut List Halle—the undeniable crowd favorite of the opening evening. Somewhere between concert and cabaret, he repeatedly interrupted his repertoire of bawdy songs with zany attempts to satisfy the curators’ alleged demand for more politics. These interventions often took the form of participatory stunts: from auctioning off his own drawings, to holding impromptu surveys—Would you rather go to an orgy with the FPÖ or the AfD?—to improvising lyrics out of whatever the audience wrote in the performance’s WhatsApp chat. As the evening drew on, it became clear that these interludes weren’t just a parody of participatory art, but also of democratic politics as well: the illusion of choice between similarly odious parties, demagogues pandering to whatever they think we want to hear.
Dimchev’s jab at the festival’s political ambitions wasn’t entirely out of step with the self-awareness of the curators’ own approach. Throughout the main exhibition, held in a former distillery, one senses a deliberate effort to avoid the over-reliance on ethnographic novelty that has by now come to plague almost every politically-minded show: art that’s supposed to be interesting because it’s by interesting people from interesting places addressing interesting things. Not that there’s any shortage of that here, but the curatorial touch is refreshingly light. The wall texts are consistently concise, and all of the works—mostly new commissions—have been given enough space to speak for themselves. Moreover, there’s little in the way of conventional documentary approaches. Instead, fiction, absurdity, and the grotesque rule the day.
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By their own account, the curators of the art section were particularly drawn to practices that open up ambivalent perspectives on recent history, ones that are more difficult to reconcile with official narratives. But, instead of imposing this premise on the artworks or their framing, they opted to flesh it out via the curatorial intervention Six Characters of Hotel W. At stations scattered throughout the main exhibition’s labyrinth of rooms, visitors encounter fictional biographies contributed by six commissioned authors. Each orbits around the years during and after WWII. We encounter a fugitive Nazi scientist who turns his taxonomic passions to Argentine insects; an allied officer musing on the practical impossibility of de-Nazification, “everyone’s responsible, and, thus, no one is”; even a Holocaust survivor who gets roped into a conspiracy against fellow Jews. By turns farcical and deadly earnest, each of the historically informed tales provides a rich sense of the messy moral dilemmas of life in wartime.
Fig.3
The history of recent and ongoing conflicts was the thread connecting most of the works, though it wasn’t always explicit. Pedro Gómez-Egaña’s Night at Dawn takes its cue from Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, in which a cast of well-to-do characters pass their days in a Swiss sanatorium during World War I. The set-like installation takes the form of a bourgeois study riven by accordion-like cuts in the fabric of space, seemingly made by more-than-human forces. Its sprawling size is contrasted elsewhere by Stephan Mörsch’s Gaza Surf Club, which presents a series of 1:10 scale models of beach facilities that once served a variety of social functions along the Gazan coast before the genocide. Though the wall text claims that the works originally set out to complicate the image of Gaza as an “open-air concentration camp,” they now exude an eerie sense of resignation, as if preemptively memorializing lives still in the process of being extinguished.
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There were a number of welcome departures from the festival’s weightier themes. Pauline Curnier Jardin’s Jeanet Film Adulte follows a carnival in Aalst, Belgium, which was delisted as a UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage site at the city’s own request. It focuses on the figure of “Vuil Jeanet” (dirty Jeanet), where cross-dressing men embody all the worst stereotypes of trans women, sex workers, and insatiable wives. The unsparing succession of close-ups zooms in on the smeared make-up and gaudy fabrics of the drunken lads, as plastic baby heads and dildos flop out from beneath their skirts. Downstairs, the absurdity takes a more comic turn in Angélique Aubrit and Ludovic Beillard’s Besser ein gesunder Esel als ein krankes Pferd, where a cast of oversized weasels banter about how to carry on after capitalism’s collapse.
A personal highlight was Grey Earth, a film in progress by Dana Kavelina. Combining stop motion, hand-drawn animation, and crystalline 4K footage, it revolves around three prematurely terminated narratives. Among them, two young Ukrainian soldiers on the front fantasizing about life after the war, maybe starting a farm; an adorably helpless cow wandering the fields before getting sent off to the milk factory; and a former farmer turned soldier, or perhaps deserter, lamenting a life spent in servitude to the powers that be. The overriding ambience is one of exhaustion, and the tenderness of the rambling voices resembles nothing so much as the pillow talk of a tired lover after work. Eschewing both analysis and outcry, Kavelina leaves viewers haunted by the littleness of human lives and the indifference of the structures we’ve built for ourselves—a vision virtually irreconcilable with political clichés of heroism or national community. Within the larger context of the festival, her work seemed to come as a reminder of Walter Benjamin’s observation that the political tendency of a work can only be effective if it is also artistically adequate.
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Unfortunately, the same can’t be said of all the positions on offer. Though the exhibition as a whole succeeds in presenting alternative models for engaging with an ongoing past, it sometimes felt like individual artists struggled to find a compelling form for their concerns, buckling under the weight of their chosen themes. Moreover, several of the works seem to specifically suffer from being produced as commissions—managing to deliver clever proposals on time, but hardly much else. Often enough, I ended up admiring the intelligence of the curatorial decisions more than the art itself. After my third visit to the show, I couldn’t help but ask myself why I even expected that producing art in the context of a thematically driven exhibition such as this should be a job any different from selling shoes or filing copy. In the end, I guess it isn’t. And perhaps addressing that circumstance would have been one way to avoid the air of forced topicality exuded by some of the works. The burden of aboutness in art, as in life, is that it leaves little room for strangeness, let alone wonder.
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- Images:
Cover: Design: Grupa Ee
Fig.1 LIGNA, Freiheitsplatz (2025), performance, photo: steirischer herbst / Johanna Lamprecht
Fig.2 Ivo Dimchev, Hot Sotz (2025), performance, photo: steirischer herbst / Johanna Lamprecht
Fig.3 Eva Ďurovec, Never Again Peace Now (2025), installation view (detail), courtesy of the artist, photo: steirischer herbst / Mathias Völzke
Fig.4 Stephan Mörsch, courtesy of the artist
Fig.5 Dana Kavelina, courtesy of the artist
