September 24–October 18, 2026
Red flags: bad omens, warnings, superstitions. It’s tempting, in fraught times, to see them everywhere—a renewed pride in national dress, for example, which may or may not presage authoritarianism and xenophobia (“sometimes,” festival director Ekaterina Degot noted in her opening speech, “lederhosen are just lederhosen”). Red flags, she reminded the crowds, once signaled revolution, by and for the people: there’s a danger of complacency if such markers of difference are not interrogated with an open mind before their bearers are shunned. But, in the political sphere, seemingly minor initial signals often pave the way to dark consequences which might well lead someone who identified them early to wish they had taken action sooner. As Oxana Timofeeva put it in a keynote lecture, a red flag often reveals a crack in the present as much as it may offer a warning for the future. This year’s Steirischer Herbst confronted the past, present, and future with equal gusto, asking how we remember and how we forget, and what it might mean to look away from a crisis-in-waiting.
It’s a compelling theme, which the festival—comprised of performances, an education program, and a central exhibition—probed in wide-ranging and non-prescriptive ways. The dangers of nationalism were, unsurprisingly, a throughline. Daniel Dominguez Teruel’s absurdist ceremony Gloria! Gloria! Gloria! (all works 2026 except where otherwise noted) took place in the sunshine on the idyllic Hilmteich Lake. Featuring a diver, a choir, water fountains, and the solemn parade of a single black-and-white flag, the very lack of obvious meaning poked fun at over-the-top displays of patriotism. More explicit was Franz von Strolchen’s play Austria Demenzia, performed at the Orpheum theater. Center stage, before a backdrop hung with faded flags, was a large wreath flanked by singers in black dress. The year is 2055, over twenty years since a new “concept of national history” abolished public memorials. With forgetfulness of past horrors now official policy, a small group gather annually to perform their own makeshift Holocaust remembrance ceremony, its two leaders respectively haunted by a family history of complicity and a formative visit to the Majdanek camp in Poland—where people tie red ribbons to the barbed wire to ensure the dead are not forsaken.
The festival was founded in 1968 with support from the Styrian People’s Party, which has grown increasingly conservative; Steirischer Herbst, with its long history of dissidence and artistic risk, has been under attack, in recent years, from party politicians questioning its international outlook and demanding a more parochial focus on “Styrian art.” Delivering her opening address in a public square, near buildings housing both the provincial archives and the immigration office, Degot pushed back strongly, insisting that culture has to reach beyond borders, that consensus must be resisted, and that an impulse towards preservation cannot be allowed to stymy progress (“maybe” she dryly noted to applause, “moral courage has not been the strongest virtue in this place”).
Her speech was followed by Paradise Lost: Dieser Kampf ist kein Zeichen (This Battle is No Sign), a performance by Julian Warner, which unsubtly but very cheerfully dramatized the festival’s refusal to compromise on its principles. Featuring a chorus, a slightly gratuitous cheerleading troupe, and a brass band, a moustachioed wrestler—evidently representing authoritarian forces—first pooh-poohed the very idea of an avant-garde festival as elitist and degenerate, then swiftly dispatched two opponents: a feminist artist in a feathered skirt, who put up a strong but futile defence, and a neoliberal politician in a silver mankini, who—to much booing—caved in after a half-hearted resistance and shook the fascist’s hand. The day was saved by the arrival of the “Styrian Man,” an acrobatic force who triumphantly defeated the other two in one fell swoop, to chants of “we are the people.”
The point was underscored the following evening in Xenia Koghilaki’s outdoor dance performance Slamming Unplugged, in which three women appeared to be locked in a tussle, barging shoulders and pulling at each other’s clothes as the beats pulsed. Slowly, their bodies began to work together rather than against each other, as they transformed into something more like a three-headed beast—a match for any fascist-inclined wrestler. Communal movement also drove Alex Baczyński-Jenkins’s beautiful Angelic Conversations, which featured three dancers, drawn together in contemplation as they shapeshifted between styles: with close-ups of faces and gestures on a large screen affording both intimacy and distance, they appeared sometimes yearning, sometimes lustful, sometimes melancholic, coming apart and together as if trying out different modes of being and of relating.
In an opening weekend packed with energetic performances, the highlight remained the small but dense central exhibition, housed in a seventeenth-century house that was most recently a schnitzel tavern. In the spirit of the building’s history, the curators devised a sort of haunted doll’s house, each small room a full-scale installation telling its own intriguing story, or exploring a dark fantasy or obsession. Entering Heather Phillipson’s The Quaking and the Shaking of Our Previous Making, we witness the eerie aftermath of a party (or a ritual of sorts): carrier bags and streamers hang from the ceiling, flowers arranged in the shape of a dead rat curl in a corner, and an oversized loaf of bread (chewed) oozes with the wax of pink candles. Ghosts prevail, too, in Rawan Almukhtar’s The Witnessing Archive (2010), a series of drawings on tracing paper, showing ordinary-looking streets marked by snipers, checkpoints, and barbed wire. Taped to the windows of the adjoining room, these works were made in Iraq after US troops confiscated the artist’s camera, and record—in the absence of photographic evidence—the traces occupation has left on the once-familiar landscape.
The quiet ambiance of these rooms quickly gave way to visual overload. Gabriele Edlbauer and Julia S. Goodman’s Live, Laugh, Lamps: Radical Feminism in Soft Lighting invites us into the deranged studio of a fangirl obsessed with right-wing female leaders, while Nikolay Karabinovych’s Prohujalo sa južnim vetrom (Gone with the Southern Wind) constructs an abandoned detective agency, floor, walls, and desk cluttered with spattered blood, cuckoo clocks, bottles of moldering liquid, evidence papers, and maps of post-socialist Yugoslavia. Alina Kleytman’s video Thank You, Daddy! depicts a video-game interface, with a woman in underwear gyrating to camera, streaming, allegedly, “live from the front line.” The goal of the game: “independence of Ukraine.” “Coins” are sent by viewers—“daddy Poland,” “daddy USA,” “daddy NATO,” who leave lewd comments in a sidebar. War, here, is pornography, its perverse consumption leaving the prize of “victory” well beyond the reach of the paltry tips. The stand-out work was Josefin Arnell’s hilarious video Edge of Empire, in which Florentina Holzinger plays a lesbian vampire who has arrived in modern-day Austria to discover that her blood is a hot commodity. Chased around town by wellness gurus and influencers desperate for a bite (“fast detox treatment!”) Carmilla (her name derived from Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 Gothic novella) mourns her lost love and her castle, destined to become a tourist attraction.
How should we respond to the red flags overwhelming contemporary life? The festival provided its own answer. Its program showed that resistance comes in forms both overt and subtle, through humor and empathy as well as action. The uncompromising weirdness of so many of the offerings was a glorious tribute to the health of an avant-garde tradition. Those red flags that were once symbols of revolution now predominantly evoke, if not danger, then bureaucracy, rules designed to weaken and paralyze. If the only way to avoid paralysis and stagnation is to galvanise energy for change, the festival—in its own, delightfully idiosyncratic way—showed a path forward.
