Walk & Talk

HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark offers guided tours inviting the visitors to engage more deeply with the exhibition. We are delighted to guide you through the exhibitions in an informal and stimulating way, while responding to your further interests. This is not a classic guided tour, but visitors are given the opportunity to enter into dialogue with our experts about the current exhibitions, which revolve around history and its significance for the present and future. With varying focal points, the tour is intended to further facilitate the conversation in a relaxed atmosphere.

In his exhibition Atlanten — Ich oder das Chaos [Atlases – Me or the chaos], Franz Kapfer, awarded with the Styrian Prize of Appreciation, presents several groups of works which critically discuss key historical events and their history, translated into a contemporary sculptural form. Mythical narratives still influence both society and politics, which in turn determine whose stories are told. In his practice, Kapfer reveals how monuments influence our society and its composition, examining how historical objects, symbols, and architectural monuments are used and sometimes misused politically and by the media. The titanic sky bearer Atlas from Greek mythology plays a crucial role here.

The US-Dominican choreographer Isabel Lewis and the Munich painter Dirk Bell also explore history and its impact on the present. The exhibition Ever/​Repair is accompanied by sounds and texts investigating the Jamaican tradition of the Junkanoo carnival. This tradition allowed black, enslaved bodies within the colonial world in particular to reverse and recast social roles through performance. Inspired by baroque ornamentation, Lewis and Bell’s painted and movable canvases mutate into variable stage sets which, in addition to forming an installation, are also used for a performance in which boundaries between audience and performers are blurred. The artist couple create spaces for multi-sensory physical experience and social exchange thereby referring to their practice of hosting, in which notions of care are central.