Bullet storage – Weekend – Kommersant
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Graz is hosting the Styrian Autumn 2022 festival, one of the most important contemporary art forums in Austria, which has been headed by curator and critic Ekaterina Degot for five years in a row. The theme of the festival and the main festival exhibition this year is “War in the distance”.
Above the main staircase of the Ioanneum, instead of some fresco suitable for the pseudo-Baroque interior, there is a video projection that fills the space with a disgusting sound. In the frame is a seashore shot from a low point of view with two barely distinguishable figures of fishermen in the distance: a serene seascape could look like a completely idyllic picture if slimy whitish jellyfish did not plop down on the coastal pebbles taken in close-up. The video is looped, as if it has no beginning or end, from time to time the slaps of gelatinous bodies breaking on the ground are blocked by the rumble of a flying plane, so that the collective suicide of jellyfish begins to seem like some kind of carpet bombing. “Coast” by Ukrainian artist Mykola Ridny was filmed on the Black Sea in the summer of 2008 – that summer, when Russian military planes fly to Georgia, the Black Sea idyll will end and the historical spiral will once again enter a steep turn.
However, perhaps it never went out of a sharp turn, just every foreign war is far away, and its own is close, and although any anti-war text and any anti-war work tries to convey this simple idea to the audience, the audience, confirming the accuracy of simple thoughts, begins to understand the meaning of the message, only when it explodes right at your side. Several halls – and the viewer finds himself in front of another video, unlike the “Coast”, silent. In the frame – an old “Volga” in the middle of an autumn field somewhere in the mountains: people, men, women, old people, children, rush to it from all sides, appearing here and there from the cold fog – in four minutes of screen time, ready to fall apart the car is miraculously stuffed with several dozen people. “Volga” by Chechen artist Aslan Goisum was filmed in 2015 – for some, the Chechen wars are a thing of the past, for some they have always remained far away, but not for the artist, who was born in Grozny in 1991 and spent his entire childhood in camps refugees. Next to the Volga hangs a thin expressionist landscape, harmonizing with the video in terms of autumn color: a large peasant yard on the edge of the village, many wagons, horses unharnessed, people warming themselves by the fire. No gypsy exoticism – “Landscape with refugees” by the Austrian artist Karl Jirak (1897-1982) was painted after 1945 and reflects the personal experience of the painter: Jirak was born in Oplotnica, in Lower Styria – after the First World War, these lands were ceded to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, during the Second World War they were occupied, and then returned to Yugoslavia, in general, Slovenian and Austrian Styria repeatedly exchanged refugees.
The main exhibition of the current festival, made by Ekaterina Degot in a retrospective manner atypical for the Styrian Autumn, begins with the “Coast” of Mykola Ridny: founded in the revolutionary year of 1968, the festival has always strived to be at the forefront of contemporary art – the exhibition “War in the Distance” compares the current with the classical, retrieved from the collections of the Johanneum Universal Museum. Johanneum, opened by Archduke Johann of Austria in 1811, has a splendid collection of art, modern and very in tune with its romantic founder, whose unfulfilled political ambitions were sublimated in enlightenment and morganatic marriage: it is the art of Biedermeier, a romanticism that suffered a political defeat and buried revolutionary dreams in artistic creation. and family well-being. Biedermeier is widely understood at the exhibition as a permanent and immanent state of Styrian art: a still life with kitchen utensils by Anton Nowak (1865–1936), one of the founders of the Vienna Secession, was painted in 1916, but put the date “1816” on the label – no one will notice the forgery . One might think that Novak, who made illustrations for Ver Sacrum, the party magazine of the Secession, simply flaunts his virtuosity, playing with the textures of copper pots and brass jugs, but the subtext of the still life is militaristic: mountains of dishes will be melted down for military needs. In a word, “far” from the name of the festival and the exhibition means not only geographical, but also historical distances.
The militaristic overtones of European culture are what many play on at the exhibition. The Dutch artist Willem de Rooy hires high-class copyists from the world-famous “village of artists” Dafen to reproduce from photographs the still lifes of the Dutch masters of the “golden age” depicting the royal vulture: an exotic warlike bird was brought to the metropolis from distant colonies, Northern Brazil and Suriname – the ironic Dutchman again enters the role of a colonialist, resorting to the services of Chinese artisans. The historical distance of the German artist Henrique Naumann is much shorter: the installation, assembled by her from office and shop furniture of the 1990s, suddenly turns into an aggressive interior suitable for meetings of some right-wing extremist organization. And the Austrian Igor Friedrich Petkovic, who organized a community of Serbian artists in Graz, repeats history at all – like a farce. During the “Gavrilo Princip” action, captured on video, Petkovic appeared at the Graz Museum, where the “Browning” from which Gavrilo Princip fired at Archduke Ferdinand was exhibited, stole a pistol and went to the Johanneum Museum, as if intending to shoot its then director , the symbolic successor of Archduke Johann. In the hall with the funny video “Principle Gavrilo”, which is very popular with the local art crowd, there is a huge plaster bust of Archduke Johann found in the storerooms of Johanneum: there is a deep bullet mark on his forehead, who and when – in 1918? in 1934? in 1945? — shot at the idol of the Styrians, unknown.
Meanwhile, the finale of this ironic, witty exhibition built on funny rhymes is quite sad. In the very last room is a new work by Ukrainian artist Zhanna Kadyrova “Safe War”: a steel white cube in bullet holes can seem like an abstract reflection on where the autonomy of art ends and its political involvement begins, unless one knows what materials for this stylish, quasi-minimalist facility taken out of the war zone. Next to the “Safe War” there are photographs that served as a historical source for the performance “Theatricality of Delayed Death” by the Lebanese artist Raed Yassin, which opened the Styrian Autumn 2022. The performance was a remake of a puppet procession staged in Beirut in 1984, at the height of the civil war, by Lebanese director Raif Karam. The photographs show dozens of children running to see giant dolls moving through the streets against the backdrop of bombed-out houses. Of course, this procession was a protest against the massacre, and he really managed to stop the bombing and shooting for several hours, giving Beirut a short truce. Unfortunately, remakes are not always accurate and miracles do not repeat themselves.
Austria, Graz, until October 16
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