Rose-Anne Gush
Surrealism from a Global Perspective
Video
Rose-Anne Gush’s lecture analyzes the political aesthetics of Surrealism and its anti-colonial and anti-fascist orientations through artistic practices in Paris and Martinique between 1920 and 1960, asking how Surrealist works — from Chris Marker and Alain Resnais’s film Les Statues Meurent Aussi (1953, Statues Die Too) to lesser-known anti-colonial and anti-fascist archives — embodied and continue to materialize the violent inequalities and crises of capitalist modernity. Gush argues that the radical formalism of Surrealism embodied and re-situated the unequal developments of capitalist modernity. Surrealism is understood by her as a transnational movement that artistically questioned colonial power structures and presented alternative emancipatory perspectives. Gush proposed an art-historical methodology that understands art as an active component of social struggles and, in particular, places a stronger focus on previously marginalized artistic positions.
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Rose-Anne Gush
is a writer, art historian and assistant professor at the IZK — Institute for Contemporary Art at Graz University of Technology. Her research interests include political aesthetics and theories of ‘global art’, including transnational surrealism, the spatial politics of capitalism, artistic form and geographies of extraction, as well as theories of Marxism, gender, trauma and memory. Her recent articles have been published in Berlin Review, FKW // Zeitschrift für Geschlechterforschung und visuelle Kultur, Camera Austria, Brand-New-Life Magazine, Third Text, Kunst und Politik: Jahrbuch der Guernica-Gesellschaft, and Performance Research. Her first monograph Artistic Labor of the Body is forthcoming in the Historical Materialism book series published by Brill and Haymarket.
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Kathy Rae Huffman
FROM CYBERFEMINISM
UNTIL NOW
Video
Kathy Rae Huffman’s lecture traces the evolution of cyberfeminism since the 1990s: it connected women in the digital sphere, challenged existing power structures, and presented examples — from VNS Matrix to contemporary digital activism — that highlight critiques of platform corporations, AI cultures, and global inequalities.
Kathy Rae Huffman Karin M. Schmidlechner
Styrian women during and after National Socialism
Video
In her research and in the volume Aus dem Blickfeld (Out of Sight), co-edited with Heimo Halbrainer, Karin Maria Schmidlechner demonstrates that the lived realities of Styrian women during the Nazi era and the postwar period were diverse and ambivalent. Hence, she broadens the scholarly discourse on their daily lives while simultaneously deconstructing common narratives such as that of the conformist woman or the so-called “rubble woman.”
Karin M. Schmidlechner Eva Ursprung
The Art of Surfacing
Slide show
With the exhibition The Art of Surfacing, HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark presents the multifaceted work of Austrian artist, musician, and curator Eva Ursprung, who was awarded the Honorary Prize of the Province of Styria in 2024. Her cross-media, feminist, and socially critical approaches revolve around the element of water as a metaphor for change and political and ecological processes.
Slide show Eva Ursprung Susanne Wenger
Àdùnní Olórìṣà
Slide show
Susanne Wenger gilt als eine zentrale Künstlerin Österreichs nach 1945 und als frühe Wegbereiterin des Surrealismus. Ihr Œuvre, das Skulpturen, Gemälde, Zeichnungen, Drucke und Batiken umfasst, überschreitet ästhetische Kategorien und verbindet Kunst, Spiritualität und Mythos.
Slide Show Susanne Wenger Tobias Boos
Chainsaws, crypto, corruption.
Argentina between populism and the radical right
Video
Tobias Boos is political scientist at the University of Vienna who specializes in Latin America, populism, and economic developments, such as Argentina’s crisis since the 2000s and current right-wing populist movements like that led by Javier Milei.
Tobias Boos Exhibition Tour
Diego Bianchi: Errores Irreales
Video
Diego Bianchi’s immersive sculptural installations reinterpret the concepts of sculpture and of the torso, taking seriously the sensitivity and distress of the human body as subjected to manifold pressures, and expanding and updating its forms of expression.
Exhibition Tour Diego Bianchi Exhibition Tour
Celina Eceiza: Ofrenda
Video
A metabolic force governs the growth of Celina Eceiza’s work, which involves textile collages, sculptures, paintings and drawings — both tiny and colossal in scale — as laborious as they are elementary. The artist combines handcrafted textile techniques and processes such as patchwork, found object collages and, more recently, chalk pastels, which give her images a new sense of fluidity.
Ausstellungsrundgang Celina Eceiza Annemarie Arzberger
dreamed awake
Slide show
For HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark the artist has developed her first own performative presentation, with a setting for her puppets with three scenes set in an imaginary spaceship, an exhibition, and the spaces that the scenes depict: the Schlouflaboar, the Houloudecks, and the Space Grotto Disco. The piece is a combination of physical theater and puppetry, performed by the artist together with her sister Katharina Arzberger and accompanied by musical interludes arranged by Manuel Obriejtan.
Slide Show Annemarie Arzberger