Visit

HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark
Burgring 2
8010 Graz
Austria
 

Free Admission

Opening hours & Visitor information

Tuesday – Sunday: 11am – 6pm
Open on holidays
Closed December 23, 2021 – January 2, 2022 

Online audio guide: free 
Print guide: Euro 2
Print guide for Ö1 Club card holders: Euro 1
Print guide for Friends of HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark: free
 

Art in dialogue
Mediation and its programs

Contemporary art is multidimensional and invites open interpretations. HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark creates a colorful communication program that encourages people to see and fantasize about art on different levels. For this purpose, we offer guided tours and other mediation formats to visit the exhibitions together. The focus is on the enjoyment of art and the desire to learn more about it and exchange.

The aim of this offer is to enter into a dialogue with the visitors in order to enter into an open exchange with the works and their themes in a stimulating atmosphere. If this succeeds, art can reveal both new and unusual connections between things and provide a fresh look at everyday life and far beyond.

Contact us if you would like to take advantage of any of the following communication formats. You can find further project-specific mediation offers in the program (https://​halle​-fuer​-kun​st​.at/​p​r​o​g​ramm/) of the current exhibitions. Please do not hesitate to contact our colleague Tobias Ihl (ti@halle-fuer-kunst.at/ +43 316 740084 11) for further information and to make an appointment.

 

Walk & Talk
Exhibition Tour 

Euro 2 per person
includes guided tour, handout and online guide
Group size up to 20 persons
Registration and Covid 19-confirmation (vaccinated/​tested/​recovered) required

also available in English language

At HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark we pick up on exciting topics that are currently keeping our society in motion. With the two exhibitions on Doreen Garner and Kevin Jerome Everson we take up impulses of the Black Lives Matter movement. The exhibitions focus attention on the artistic work of two African-American artists.

The hall’s large exhibition space is darkened and has an imposing screen. There’s plenty of variety here with shorter film works by Kevin Jerome Everson. Everson grew up in Mansfield, Ohio; a town deeply rooted in a working-class industrial culture. As a result, many of Everson’s films feature African-American people at work and doing their jobs. Everson is very subtle and avoids explicit situations and rash judgments. It is interesting to see the searching and questioning gaze of the films, whereby the limits and freedoms of black lives are revealed. Everson’s film works, however, are by no means exhausted in the documentary; rather, they open up an unexpected access to abstraction. 

On the second exhibition level there are sculptural works by Doreen Garner, a young New York artist of African origin. The works are visually very expressive, Garner combines countless different materials such as silicone, beads, crystals, hair and fluorescent tubes. The artist’s works are reminiscent of injured bodies and pieces of flesh and address a dark chapter in American history. Garner points to traumatic events and injustices done to black bodies in the medical field. Especially in the 18th and 19th centuries, the bodies of African slaves were violated and abused by medicine in the name of progress. Garner makes us painfully aware of the effects of colonialism and racism and shows how they are evident in American history. 

 

Cool School
Tour for pupils

Euro 2 per person
includes guided tour, handout and online guide
Group size up to 20 persons
Registration and Covid 19-confirmation (vaccinated/​tested/​recovered) required

also available in English language

The hall’s large exhibition space offers a special cinematic experience. Short film works by Kevin Jerome Everson are shown there. The exhibition is very diverse, the films shown last only a few minutes. Nevertheless, there is a lot to see. Often we look through the artist’s camera into the sky, here the sun can be seen, other films show African-American people in motion. Many exciting impressions come together: a space of white light, the sea, white noise, a young man rapping, an open space where another roller skates, without a destination. Together, new stories and perspectives on our world open up to us. What is your own perspective?

The atmosphere in the second exhibition is charged with tension. Here you can see sculptures by Doreen Garner, a young, upcoming artist who lives in New York. She uses a lot of different material for her sculptures, for example hair, beads and neon tubes. The sculptures look like parts from a slaughterhouse, there are hooks on which pieces of meat and remains of bodies hang. If we look closer, we notice that the skin of the bodies is dark. The artist wants to make us understand what has been done to many people of African origin and wants to address these acts in her work. In the name of medical progress, many have been hurt and mistreated. The artist draws attention to racism and resists forgetting.

 

Academy
Tour for Lecturers/ Students

Euro 2 per person
includes guided tour, handout and online guide
Group size up to 20 persons
Registration and Covid 19-confirmation (vaccinated/​tested/​recovered) required

also available in English language

With the current positions in the exhibition space, HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark reflects on social issues that have gained renewed urgency with the Black Lives Matter movement. With Doreen Garner and Kevin Jerome Everson, the artistic work of two African-American artists and thus the political discourse in the USA is the focus of attention.

The exhibition Recover features several short film works by artist and experimental filmmaker Kevin Jerome Everson that present unusual perspectives. On the one hand, these deal with the observation of the sky and with the phenomenon of the solar eclipse; on the other hand, the works negotiate questions of representation of different Black communities. The orientation reflects on the possibility of cognition, of seeing, not seeing, darkness and glare. Everson is often perceived as an experimental filmmaker who works in a documentary manner and who provides supposedly ​“authentic” insights into the various lifeworlds of the African-American population. Author and university lecturer Michael Boyce Gillespie criticizes this as a simplification of what he understands terminologically as Black Cinema and as Black Film. Beyond the documentary, Everson places a high value on the formal qualities of his works and also approaches abstraction.

From Doreen Garner is an exhibition on view that explores the problematic relationships between ​“race” and the medical system in the United States. In doing so, Garner has engaged with Harriet A. Washington’s publication Medical Apartheid (2007), in which the medical theorist historically chronicles the dehumanization and exploitation of the black body through medicine. She reveals how cruel experiments were carried out on the bodies of African slaves in the 19th century under the banner of medical progress. On the one hand, Doreen Garner relentlessly depicts the degradation and objectification of the black body, while at the same time identifying white bodies as the ones that caused this suffering. Doreen Garner uses an additive approach for her sculptures, combining various materials to create synthetic bodily entities that resemble chunks of flesh or anthropomorphic fragments.

Contact

+43 316 740084
info@​halle-​fuer-​kunst.​at

Journey

Tram lines 1 & 7
Bus lines 30, 31 & 39
Station: Oper / Kaiser-Josef-Platz