At the opening of steirischer herbst yesterday, director Ekaterina Degot emphasized the festival’s political dimension. Referring to the current war in Ukraine, she explained that this aspect “needs to be discovered, brought to light and stripped of a bunch of misleading meanings”. The theme “A war in the distance” is reflected in all program items this year, from the central exhibition in the Neue Galerie to performances.
“This festival is not regarding war in Ukraine or even regarding wars in general. It’s regarding being here, in the quiet center of Europe – where war is far away,” stressed Ekaterina Degot in her opening speech on the main square in Graz. From her point of view, art is always political, “whether artists want it or not”. You have to deal with the political dimension, because even propagandistic art can have a completely different effect than it was planned.
After the opening speech, a puppet parade went through Herrengasse to the Neue Galerie. This performance The Theatricality of a Postponed Death (2022) by Raed Yassin was intended to commemorate another puppet parade that took place in Beirut in the 1980s during the civil war. The exhibition “A war in the distance” was then opened in the Neue Galerie. In the evening, the performance “Rhapsody in Yellow: A Lecture-Performance with Two Pianos” (2022) by Ming Wong took place in the Helmut-List-Halle.
