The European Dream
Rose-Anne Gush
Video
Please note that this video is available in English.
The European Dream is a collaboratively written reading performance developed by Rose-Anne Gush and her students at the Institute of Contemporary Art at TU Graz.
The performance is meant to be an artistic tool to explore the question of the ideological forces that shape Europe today. What kind of society do we live in and how can the different positions of speakers even be thought together? Ideology exists in many forms and contains beliefs, images and values that can never be considered as final and naturally given, but always tend to be presented as universal, though.
While the postmodern turn was proclaimed with the end of the 1980s and the view spread that values such as ambiguity, polyphony and difference were about to become social guiding principles, the situation now seems to have changed dramatically. For some time now, a revival of major ideological narratives has been observable, narratives that offer simple solutions to complex questions. Considering old social inequalities rearising and the ongoing political rejections, a critical examination of social ideologies seems urgently needed.
Participants of the Performance:
Nicole Antunovic, Gagandeep Bhatti, Rose-Anne Gush, Elsa Karvanen, Budour Khalil, Alena Viola Köstl, Anastasiia Kutsova, Abdelrahman Elbashir, Farnoosh Namaziyan, Sali Ren, Ana Patrícia Silva Varão Moreira. Support by Christina Chalmers and Federico Campagna.
Rose-Anne Gush is Assistant-Professor at the Institute of Contemporary Art at TU Graz. Her research interest includes among others theories of Global Art, spatial politics, the spatial politics of capitalism and form, and the relationships between colonialism, fascism and capitalism. Her research and teaching are oriented towards anti-racist, feminist, and emancipatory horizons. Gush’s first book length project (in progress), Artistic Labour of the Body builds on her PhD, exploring the place, use of, and meaning of the body in postwar art and literature in relation to Theodor W. Adorno’s aesthetics. Gush’s research is published in Kunst und Politik: Jahrbuch der Guernica-Gesellschaft (2020), Third Text (2019), Performance Research (2018), Objects of Feminism (Helsinki, 2017) and AWARE (2017).
More contributions
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 Diego Bianchi
Errores Irreales
Slide show
Diego Bianchi (*1969 Buenos Aires, lives in Buenos Aires) is considered one of Argentina’s leading artists and has, in particular, updated the concept of sculpture. For his installative and performative exhibition Errores Irreales at HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark, Bianchi has assembled a selection of his sculptures that play with the concept of the body.
Slide show Diego Bianchi Diego Bianchi
Errores Irreales
Performance
Slide show
Errores Irreales is only truly activated by the performance staged by Diego Bianchi himself in order to complete his theatrical installation, which takes physicality and its limits to a new level.
Diego Bianchi, Performance Celina Eceiza
Ofrenda
Slide show
Ofrenda [Offering] presents a way of inhabiting a space as if the architecture were a body, breathing erratically, changing states as you pass from one room to the next. The rigidity of the building collapses as the walls are draped in thousands of metres of fabric joined together through the collective and timeless action of sewing, until they form a single smooth surface, sensitive to the slightest change.
Slide show Celina Eceiza Abaseh Mirvali
Artistic Director, viennacontemporary
Video
The conversation between Abaseh Mirvali, director of viennacontemporary, and Sandro Droschl spans Diego Bianchi’s current exhibition and Celina Eceiza’s work in the context of Argentine art history to Mirvali’s many years of expertise and her international career. At the same time, her central role in the dynamic and innovative viennacontemporary 2025 was highlighted.
Abaseh Mirvali Talk Morning Séance
alias Simone Borghi
Video
Italian composer and sound artist Simone Borghi, alias Morning Séance, expands Celina Eceiza’s “soft museum” in her exhibition Ofrenda at HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark with his atmospheric, constantly changing music, using his musical performance to enable visitors to experience physicality, space, and perception in new ways.
Morning Séance alias Simone Borghi