steirischer herbst '22

A War in the Distance

This year's edition of the festival steirischer herbst centers on an exhibition in both wings of the first floor of Neue Galerie Graz. It combines historical works from the gallery's collection with projects by contemporary artists, thus offering a rereading of the collection through the prism of ignored wars, hidden histories, and repressed conflicts. Rereadings of Neue Galerie Graz's collections have already been undertaken in the past, partly in the frame of steirischer herbst, often in search of forms and media prefiguring modernist and contemporary art.

This time, the exhibition focuses on works that, in modernism-centered art histories, remained mostly in the shadows: 19th- and 20th-century works that were neglected due to their figurative and narrative qualities. These are linked to works by contemporary artists in different media, most of them newly commissioned. They provide artistic and curatorial comments to ominously peaceful artworks, amplifying the echoes of not-so-distant battles and their far-reaching consequences. The exhibition is divided into chapters and arranged according to subjective curatorial choices, built on free associations and counterpoints. Its focus is on the political uses of painting, and its common thread is a growing sense of danger, connected to the veiled and open conflicts of Austrian history. These include historical grievances related to the loss of empire, the long history of colonialism, exoticization, and othering in Central and Eastern Europe, as well as the dramas and struggles of class, as solemnly and playfully reflected in works of art.

Funded artists: Assaf Gruber, Iman Issa, Willem De Rooij

Iman Issa Animal Masks for Tribunal Scene (2022)
Iman Issa's installation is part of the ongoing series Surrogates, initiated in 2019. It is made up of a collection of displays, each of which is composed of elements extracted from a fictitious film set. Props, equipment, actors, locations, or other material once again assume a three-dimensional form. These elements are presented alongside a textual description of the main film sequence(s) in which they are featured. Together, they slowly unravel a newly devised narrative for a film titled Surrogates, a film about things, to be used, in order of appearance, by self or others, for touching upon larger, insidious, or different things. The present installation relates to a cinematic sequence that describes an actor performing the various roles of perpetrator, victim and lawyer in a courtroom scene, as described in the freestanding text panel. In the context of the other works in the exhibition, it can be read as a negotiation of how artists deal with structures of domination – in which they are perpetrators, victims, and judges.

Willem de Rooij King Vulture (2022)
Willem de Rooij's installation King Vulture comprises a set of four painted copies of photographs, commissioned by the artist to Yaohui Zhu and his team at the Yunxi Art Studio in Dafen, China. The original photographs depict works by 17th-century Dutch painter Jan Weenix (ca. 1640–1719) that feature the motif of a king vulture. This scavenger was first seen in Europe when it was imported from occupied territories in Dutch colonies in northern Brazil and Suriname. In Weenix's works the king vulture is rendered an exoticized other floating in fictional cultural landscapes surrounded by imported animals as well as those local to the Netherlands. The contrasts between reality and fiction, the local and the exotic in these paintings illustrate the moral, political, and artistic maneuvers of a young republic that was also a colonial power. For more than a decade, De Rooij has been researching Weenix, his cousin Melchior d'Hondecoeter (1635–1695), and their student Dirk Valkenburg (1675–1721). His analysis of their interconnected bodies of work tells a story not only of the iconographic promotion of power in the Dutch empire, but also one of intergenerational exchange and shared authorship. It could be assumed that there are programmatic and economic overlaps between the 17th-century Dutch painting workshop, with its typically prolific and multi-authored output, and present-day practices in Dafen. By layering and exhibiting different types of reproduction techniques, De Rooij questions contemporary ethics around ownership and loan politics in the realm of public collections.

Assaf Gruber Never Come Back (2022)
Museum depots are places where things are kept out of sight, but also protected from all-too-schematic historical judgments. In his new film, Assaf Gruber continues his ongoing investigation of the backstage areas of art institutions to engage with Neue Galerie Graz's holdings. In the cage-like space of the repository, we see a naked musician working intensely on a composition. He is inspired by artists whose past belongs to a gray area between modernist aspirations and enthusiasm for Nazism, and whose works combine a taste for the exotic with local patriotism, religious fervor, and eroticism. Our mysterious protagonist tentatively plays a familiar melody. It’s a song known to many of us, recognizable from dance floors across Europe—but how many of us have ever bothered to listen to its remarkably racist and imperialist lyrics?

More about the festival steirischer herbst '22