Where Are We Now?

2017 marks the 50th edition of steirischer herbst. As an international festival for new art, it has always understood itself as a place of lively engagement with the complex relationships of the present. In the same spirit, it will focus for its anniversary on the here and now rather than making the past the centre of attention. Where Are We Now?, is the fundamental question posed—not just as this year’s festival leitmotif but also by a book that has been published now as a commissioned work. It is a challenge to take a sharp look at the world: at what is happening around us, at what is happening beyond our field of vision, at things we generally prefer to block out. It is a call to critical self-positioning and to take a stand.

The coordinate system is, at the same time, completely open. The examination of one’s own position in the spatial fabric of the world, whose centres and peripheries are currently undergoing an immense shift, is just as relevant as a positioning within the historical process, which is continually being rewritten as “History.” Bringing private fears or local success stories into consciousness can be just as revealing as an academic analysis of political developments or artistic portrayals of social phenomena. What is most crucial is for us to understand the fundamental openness of the coordinate system: There are no fixed points for the gauging of our reality. We can question all the structures, evidence and dominant narratives of our time. Perhaps Donald Trump was the first to understand this and put it shamelessly into practice. Perhaps we have to ask ourselves self-critically, if art and culture have rejected the increasing commodification of all areas of life, the polarisation and erosion of solidarity, too often only within their own circles. “If art is good for anything,” writes Marcus Steinweg in this book, “it‘s for destabilising all of those illusions that allow the textures of our reality to seem consistent.” We can doubt. And create.

Where Are We Now? is a question that has accompanied the festival team from the very start. In this year, and with this book, this question is explicitly asked to more than 50 artists and theoreticians, whose fabulous work has shaped the festival over the past decade. The diversity of their answers provides us with an artistic and philosophical cartography of the present. It is characterised less by boundaries, than by an expansion of the horizon and the realm of facts. Expansions in order to create concrete spaces of opportunity that do not lie beyond our reality, but in it (if you want it), and that can be occupied by us in the best sense of the word.

With contributions by Jörg Albrecht, Lola Arias, Aleida Assmann, Yael Bartana, Leah Borromeo, Ulla von Brandenburg, Ann Cotten, Black Cracker, Roberto Dainotto, Charles Esche, Tim Etchells, feld72, Peter Friedl, Philipp Gehmacher, Beatrice Gibson, Georg Friedrich Haas, Heidrun Holzfeind, Iconoclasistas, Lois Keidan, Veronica Kaup-Hasler, Alexander Kluge, Federico León, Frie Leysen, Alanna Lockward, Florian Malzacher, Evgeny Morozov, Rabih Mroué, Fiston Mwanza Mugila, Nature Theater of Oklahoma, Olga Neuwirth, Molly Nilsson, Dan Perjovschi, Peter Piller, Tobias Putrih, Walid Raad, raumlabor berlin, Rimini Protokoll, Monika Rinck, Ivana Sajko, Salma Shaleh, Andreas Spechtl, Marcus Steinweg, Gisèle Vienne, Joseph Vogl, Clemens von Wedemeyer, Joanna Wozny

268 Pages / 190 Images / 230 x 300 mm / German & Englisch
The Green Box, Berlin, 2017
ISBN 978-3-941644-97-7
 

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The presentation of the book will take place at steirischer herbst festival in Graz: On October 12 & 13, Where Are We Now? will be asked during an eponymously named “philosophical canteen” that will look at the question in various artistic and theoretical ways. Book editor Christiane Kühl as well as artists and theorists—among them Heidi Ballett, Clémentine Deliss, Tim Etchells and Marcus Steinweg—will take part.