Leon Höllhumer:

The Feast

14.12.2024–19.1.2025

The Styrian artist, choreographer, and filmmaker Leon Höllhumer works on performative live events, films, and exhibition projects. His practice plays with elements of the performative and theatrical while exploring questions of identity, the body, and power. In complex settings he develops situational plots and scenic images in which he himself interacts with various protagonists, such as choreographers Florentina Holzinger and Annina Machaz, musicians Karolina Preuschl, Lukas König, Didi Kern, and PUKE PUDDLE, and the writer Ferdinand Schmalz.

“My multimedia works situated between pop and punk combine performance, photography, sculpture, film, and storytelling. The borders between the different media are permanently shifting, devoted more to a form of ​‘worldbuilding’ than any linear narrative. In this unclear universe subject to permanent transformation, plots become sculptures and objects become performative elements. Varnished ceramic objects become grotesque tools and protheses that, quite in the spirit of cyberpunk, merge functional and aesthetic aspects of technologies and lead them ad absurdum. In these often seemingly dystopian fantastic worlds characters from subculture meld with fairy-tale fantastic creatures and mystical figures. Although time and place remain undetermined, these worlds reflect socially critical issues in the here and now. Their eccentricity often marks out a specific aspect of othernesss, a rejection of a certain norm and its social consequences. Thus an imaginative world unfolds between humor and horror, with a fictitious landscape available to simulate social processes in a displaced manner.” (Leon Höllhumer)

For HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark the artist will adapt a current installation performance, which will be created on site and form the basis for a new film production. The project will combine performative live elements from film, installation, and stage set in the manner of a total work of art.

Curators: Sandro Droschl, Jan Tappe