September 18–October 12, 2025
The 58th edition of Austria’s interdisciplinary arts festival returns to the point at which it started in 1968: anti-fascist critique in a polarized society filled with right-wing undercurrents. “There is a crude Russian word for extreme dismay—pizdets,” noted curator David Riff during a walkthrough, “and since 2022, there seems to be no end to it.” The festival’s director, Ekaterina Degot, puts it more decorously: “A grim déjà vu reigns.” The attention to the stubborn recurrence of identitarianism, fascism, and war is typical of the festival’s program since 2018 under Degot and Riff (and their colleagues Pieternel Vermoortel and Gábor Thury), yet this year felt particularly dark.
It paints a society of shapeshifters, in which both values and words are subject to constant redefinition. How has the post–World War II precept “Never again war,” for example, been inverted? It is all the more dispiriting that anti-fascist writer Ernst Toller identified the same problem in his 1934–36 play Nie wieder Friede, from which this edition takes its title. The festival stages this déjà vu through recurrent citations of interwar anti-fascist texts and by foregrounding the recent perversion of those values.
As a prelude to the exhibition, Ahmet Öğüt conducted a renaming ceremony for Graz’s Freiheitsplatz (Freedom Square). Its new title? Freiheitsplatz. This is the third time that the square has been given the name. The First Austrian Republic changed it from the original Franzensplatz in 1918; the old name was restored in 1934 before the Nazis once again dedicated it to “freedom” in 1938. Öğüt’s gesture towards renaming alerts us to how the meaning and implications of the word “freedom” change with time. LIGNA’s opening performance on Freiheitsplatz might be read as an experiment in how crowds can be manipulated: instructions delivered through headphones guided participants into cheerful, synchronized movements. The effect is to remind us that, when a society’s principles are contested and its allegiances uncertain, the ability to orchestrate collective behavior is especially dangerous.
The crowd, including those who kept their distance, was led to a nearby theater, where Degot delivered her opening address amid decor evoking the jittery chic of Weimar’s interwar avant-garde. She spoke of Russia’s war in Ukraine and Israel’s in Gaza, which, together with the rise of the far right inside Europe, constitute the festival’s axes. They are most powerfully articulated in works by Haim Sokol and Dana Kavelina, and in Michiel Vandevelde, Pankaj Tiwari, and Eneas Prawdzic’s performance Violenza 2025—each expressing firsthand experience of these realities in a form of neo-expressionist desperation, as in Toller’s play.
Haim Sokol left Russia for Israel in 2022—only to move, as he puts it, from an “invader” state to an “occupier.” In a former employee apartment within the old distillery complex, renamed BAU for this edition, that hosts the central exhibition, he has installed Scarecrow (all works are new commissions, unless stated), a dense environment that evokes the claustrophobia and dread of being trapped in a far-right society at war. Unable to escape the disgust, he draws in black acrylic on kraft paper, mostly pictures of ravens and angry, desperate verse. He also paints self-deprecating self-portraits riffing on shameless images circulated by Israeli soldiers. He thematizes aggression into impotence and turns it upon himself.
Dana Kavelina’s unfinished stop-motion film Grey Earth follows an exhausted Ukrainian soldier as he staggers back to his lines. He addresses a dung beetle and the moon, recalls a younger comrade nicknamed “Mineral”—once hopeful, now dead—and imagines losing a leg to gain some respite in hospital before returning to war. Kavelina counterpoints him with a gaunt cow that wanders through near-dead cornfields “pollinated” by drone-sprayed pesticides. Before collapsing, the soldier peers into the equally depleted soil, recalling the millions promised for its riches and Mineral—now decomposing into “millions of minerals.” The final shots linger on a grave mound with flowers. The film then loops to a chanson-like Ukrainian song, piercing in its playfulness, as the artist’s hands “dance” with the puppet’s, while a meat grinder keeps turning in clouds of kitchen smoke.
In Violenza 2025, five young men on stage voice familiar right-wing talking points such as “remigration,” seeming like real radicals unexpectedly given a platform, prompting a few walkouts. This mutates into expressionist Tanztheater: performers in underwear execute increasingly violent collective drills amid Greek columns and haze, moving from static bodybuilding poses à la Arnold Schwarzenegger to group formations, dance, and combat. In the end, a single fully clothed man reads excerpts from Toller, warning against underestimating society’s drift toward fascism. In the ensuing discussion, in sometimes emotional terms, members of the audience voiced criticism of the artists for their perceived lack of distance. This was followed by an exchange about the way that the local audience receives the work, and what it expects of an art festival.
Staged in the former Bauer distillery in the complex (which is itself located in the traditionally immigrant neighborhood of Gries), the festival’s central exhibition casts its viewers as captives—either in a mountain sanatorium, recalling Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924), with its diagnosis of a societal “sympathy with death,” or aboard the freighter Capitaine Paul-Lemerle, which carried anti-fascist avant-gardists out of Europe in 1941. One might accuse the curators of being fixated on fascism and war; more plausibly, you might say that fatigue has set in. After years of exploring a theme that once seemed prescient but now looks disturbingly like reality, they have shifted toward neo-expressionism, recalling Weimar-era cabarets where laughter and parties were all that remained—witness Ivo Dimchev’s drag-inflected Balkan-vibe opening performance, Hot Sotz. An upbeat song about vodka struck a provocative—perhaps discordant—note in the context of Russia’s continued aggression against Ukraine.
Or perhaps it is our shared desperation: a sense of the world sliding toward self-annihilation, with our “Capitaine Paul-Lemerle”—contemporary critical culture—heading for the rocks. In German, “Bau” means building, burrow, or prison; many spaces in this pre-gentrification complex evoke such liminal zones, drawing viewers into an initiatory journey. Nástio Mosquito and the duo Carla Åhlander and Gernot Wieland convert the attic into settings ranging from a subcultural club in the heavens to a ghostly dwelling for an absent child, while Gelitin turns the cellar into the Asphodel Meadows—the underworld of the dead. This edition reads as an emotional nadir, verging on desperation. In Mann’s novel, the totalitarian maniac Naphta—name alluding to oil—ends his life by suicide, but so did Toller, in 1939. Can this collective death drive be halted? No one stands outside—not even those who try to keep their distance.
