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Under the leitmotif "Truth Is Concrete," the steirische herbst festival
2012 pursues the potentiality of concrete truth as a working hypothesis and
seeks direct action, concrete transition, and knowledge. "An art that not
only presents and documents but that engages in specific political and
social situations." The exhibition project by Camera Austria with the
modified title ART Is Concrete has been cooperatively
developed together with the festival, in reaction to this leitmotif and the
implications presented by its content, especially when it comes to the
issue of (re)presentation/documentation. The gesture of the reality of art
itself is set against the assumption that art remains immersed within a
symbolic politics of representation. In seven consecutive individual
presentations, for which the artists have conceived new works, Camera
Austria is enmeshing photographic images in various artistic fields of
agency: memories, acts of staging, histories, research, archives,
appropriations, and montages. Art becomes political by defining its
interventions as a space of common affairs, where forms of art cannot be
differentiated from common experience.
Artists:
Anna Jermolaewa, subREAL, Johanna & Helmut Kandl, Stefan Panhans,
G.R.A.M., Stefanie Seibold, Christodoulos Panayiotou. Furnishing: Nicole
Six & Paul Petritsch
The more clearly we delimit ourselves
from the consensus of a liberal democratic society, as delivered to us by
the media, the stronger seems to be the need for construction of a reality
that follows its own conventions and rules. Realness
Respect shows current performative drafts that react to the
tangible difference between reality as it is subjectively perceived and
common reality as conveyed by the media. But when political art examines
the relationship of aesthetics and reality, the question soon arises as to
the autonomy and status of the artwork, based on which artists achieve
concrete, critical work on social issues. Even without any clear-cut
answers, art creates its own concrete truths here.
Artists: Martin Beck, Carola Dertnig, Christian
Falsnaes, Claire Fontaine, Ilja Karilampi, Karen Mirza / Brad Butler,
Santiago Sierra, Jason Simon, Franz Erhard Walther
Absolute
Democracy—the concept originally used by the philosopher Baruch
Spinoza and meanwhile updated by the influential critics of capitalism
Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt—stands for a vision: for the vision
of a republic founded on broad collaboration among its citizens and on the
development of common goods. It is an idea that propagates the
redistribution of wealth and power and the possibility of new, more
equitable systems of governing. It denounces the effects of capitalism and
thus challenges a normative understanding of class, race, gender, and
sexuality. Against this background, Absolute
Democracy takes a critical look at the concept of democracy,
spotlighting the problem of its social, political, and economic
consequences and offering alternative interpretations of historiography.
Artists: Julieta Aranda & Anton Vidokle, Petra
Bauer, Lenin Brea & Nuria Vila, Miklós Erhardt & Claudio
Feliziani, Isabelle Fremeaux & John Jordan, Mariam Ghani, Carles
Guerra, Nicoline van Harskamp, Jim Hubbard, Vladan Jeremić & Rena
Rädle, Alejandro Landes, Nikolay Oleynikov, Fernando Solanas,
Ultra-red. Curated by Carlos Motta & Oliver Ressler
Right-wing and populist politics are gaining ground, and with them, so
are new forms of intolerance. The growing recognition of these tendencies
as a natural drift within the political spectrum, as well as the
concomitant stigmatization of all that is culturally marked as alien, may
be designated as a social process of normalization. Formerly tabooed
positions are becoming socially acceptable, whereas the entry of right-wing
parties into the European parliaments figures only as the most visible
aspect of this political symptomatology—a call for traditional values
and ideas of social order that aim for exclusion on the basis of a politics
of identity. The exhibition Intolerance /
Normality questions the tacit normalization of these
political phantasms of cultural purity and answers with a celebration of
hybridity, monstrosity, and non-identity.
Artists: Discoteca Flaming Star, Beate Engl, Harun
Farocki, Karl Holmqvist, Ralf Homann, Scott King, Katrin Mayer & Heiko
Karn
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