Karmeliterplatz sits at the foot of the Schlossberg in Graz, Austria. So does the headquarters of the Styrian People’s Party, as the conservative ÖVP is known in Styria. Since late 2024, it has governed the state in coalition with the right-wing FPÖ, which is also the party of the governor. Right in front of this loaded political building, director Ekaterina Degot had a red boom lift hoist her up to balcony height to deliver the opening speech of the Steirischer Herbst art festival. In a black evening gown, the Russian curator launched into a plea for free art and, above all, art that’s willing to take risks. Her speech sounded a little scattered. Still, it conveyed plenty of urgency.
And at its core, Degot’s message is clear: art has to stop referring only to local traditions. The left’s focus on care and healing, on homegrown craft, isn’t fundamentally different from right-wing nostalgia. Modern art, to which Steirischer Herbst has been committed since its founding in 1968, must once again dare to think openly, to be radical, to try new things.
It was the opposite of the hollow speeches you hear so often on these occasions. Afterward, the festival title made more sense too: “Red Flags,” the warning signs on dating apps and in social media chatter, fly at Steirischer Herbst with brash irony. In other words, art shouldn’t be constantly preoccupied with playing it safe; it should seek out risk. Degot led by example with her boom lift stunt, which lent the performance credibility.
Into the thick of the culture wars
"Red Flags" is really just another word for trigger warnings. "Accurate, but it doesn't sound as sexy, we thought," Degot tells me. Spend twelve hours on the first day moving between the central exhibition, the spectacular outdoor opening and an evening dance piece, and a second red thread comes into view: the relationship between mainstream society and a so-called art elite. In a city with a left-wing council under a right-wing state government, that thread is political too.
The festival’s central exhibition occupies the building of a former schnitzel restaurant in a neighborhood around Griesplatz long home to immigrant communities. At the little tables beside the bar, headphones let you eavesdrop on bar chatter that leads straight into the culture wars. Anyone who loves the Styrian dialect will get their money’s worth right away in the texts by Max Höfler and Andreas Unterweger.
The words set the mood for a walk through the uncanny house, with its many rooms over three floors (isn’t every house in Austria a haunted house?). None of the art here can be accused of shying away from confrontation. The funniest instigation is a 24-minute film centered on the ubiquitous artist Florentina Holzinger.
Bite me, please
Josefin Arnell’s Edge of Empire retells the Dracula story starring Holzinger—and makes one crucial inversion. In this world, the self-declared first lesbian vampire and her queer entourage are A-list celebrities, hounded by fans as their carriage heads for the castle.
The execution is as funny as the storytelling is ambivalent. On one hand, the film mocks normies’ desire to be just a little bit queer. On the other, a dream glimmers through: that once-marginalized sexualities might finally arrive in the mainstream. The ending doesn’t bode well on that front. Was this perhaps the start of post-queer art, keen to shed its label again? That’s hard to answer so neatly.
Following the artistic director ascent on her red boom lift, the relationship between progressive art and supposedly regressive “folk culture” moved squarely into the ring. In a wrestling ring on Karmeliterplatz, performer, director, and musician Julian Warner staged a kind of Brechtian learning play with pop-culture means. The title, Das hier ist kein Zeichen (This is not a sign), remains utterly baffling and betrays the cultural anthropologist in the artist—in stark contrast to the performance’s hilarious and, of course, dialectical didactics.
Getting the conditions to dance
The figures in the ring, who wrestle in earnest, are called Bourgeois Camp, False Prophet, World-Famous Queer Artist from Salzburg, and, finally, Steierman—all emceed and serenaded by Warner himself. Who wins the match? Let’s put it this way: synthesis, of course, when the performer playing the Queer Artist also plays Steierman, backed by a brass band that also treats us to Barry Manilow’s “Copacabana” (“not an inherently political artist,” we’re promptly told, but it opens up “the utopian space of disco”). So the conditions do dance, once the opposition between folk and high culture has been thoroughly deconstructed.
Actual dancing follows in the evening with Angelic Conversations by Alex Baczyński-Jenkins. The piece for three dancers will also tour, with a stop at Kampnagel, the theater house in Hamburg. Clubbers and aging ravers won’t hear anything new when told that dancing, exhaustion, and the grace of bodies brushing up against each other on the dance floor may be borderline religious—and are certainly transcendent—experiences.
Either way, you can see these experiences take many forms in the three angels, who finally fall to earth in parachute formation (to superb electronic music that sidesteps the naturalism of pounding techno and always seeks, and finds, subtle layerings and disruptions). Here, too, folk culture (by which I mean techno and the club) meets high art (dance). How they meet is yet another form of the fearlessness the artistic director presumably wishes for.