Ekaterina Degot started her directorship of steirischer herbst, Austria’s oldest and only dedicated “avant-garde festival,” with an edition, “Volksfronten” (Popular Fronts, 2018), that responded to the rise of right-wing populism and social polarization in Austria and beyond. Seven years later, the state of the world, looking only as far as the fact that Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has been overshadowed by Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, has hardly improved. Borrowing its title from Jewish-German playwright Ernst Toller’s prophetic satire Nie wieder Friede (1934–36), in which Napoleon Bonaparte and St. Francis of Assisi meet on Mount Olympus and bet on humanity’s ability to live in harmony, “Never Again Peace” asks whether war has once more become an inevitable condition. (Spoiler: In Toller, the saintly optimist loses.)
The festival began on the city’s former Franzensplatz, which was twice renamed Freiheitsplatz (Freedom Square) last century; in 1918, at the end of the World War I; and 1938, following Austria’s „Anschluss“ with Nazi Germany. This past June, artist Ahmet Öğüt (*1981) legally changed its name once more, From Freedom Square to Freedom Square (all works 2025), in a public ceremony meant to reclaim a term so frequently abused by the far right, including in Steiermark, which is presently governed by the Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ, Austrian Freedom Party). Three months later, the question of “whose freedom” the square monumentalizes was raised again by the performance collective LIGNA, whose audio choreography walked visitors into the adjoining Schauspielhaus for Degot’s opening remarks. Musing on the dustiness of “postwar” and recent perversions of antifascist rhetoric to justify fascist aggression, she recalled the liberal milieu in which the festival was founded in 1967, and insisted on the artistic freedom, guaranteed in her own contract, of its curators and participants. Many of my peers observed that such a speech was unlikely to be heard these days in Berlin, where de-invitations of possibly “controversial” voices have become commonplace. Yet it was also notable that this was the first of Degot’s curatorial addresses to be held indoors, out of public view.
Ahmet Öğüt, From Freedom Square to Freedom Square, 2025. Intervention, “Never Again Peace,” Freiheitsplatz, Graz, 2025. Photo: Daniel Kindler
LIGNA, Freiheitsplatz, 2025. Performance documentation, “Never Again Peace,” Freiheitsplatz, Graz, 2025 Photo: Johanna Lamprecht
In fact, “Never Again Peace” seems to altogether withhold works from public space, instead concentrating their placement in a single venue, the former Bauer distillery – renamed BAU, with connotations ranging from foxhole to prison. It squats on a corner in Gries, a city district where the majority of residents do not hold Austrian passports, and where the FPÖ won the last election. These micropolitical tensions are retraced in Bezirk 5 (District 5), Elias Holzknecht’s (*1993) installation of photographic portraits of Gries’s residents in local community centers, bars, and the like. Soberly documentary, the work stands out in an exhibition that otherwise unfolds, to quote senior curator David Riff, like a “Kafkaesque theater” through the building’s labyrinth stories: from the attic, where Nástio Mosquito’s (*1981) animated collage-film (THEY THE THEM ARE WE: MONO(i)DIALOGUES) propels the plot of Toller’s play further into a hyperbolic Afro-Dadaist scenario, to the flooded basement, where Gelitin offer a one-on-one passage through the underworld (Am Asphodeliengrund 29) – just to bring you back to the reality of today’s traumas.
In Dana Kavelina’s (*1995) haunting stop-motion Grey Land (Work in Progress), an exhausted soldier, who wishes he had lost a leg so he could rest a little before returning to duty, meets a gaunt dairy cow at dawn on a scorched tract, hovered over by a drone. Lurking behind male fragility and the impossibility of giving in is a reminder mainly absent from consciousness of our day’s armed conflicts: the utter devastation they inflict on animals and the land. No less laced with revulsion is Scarecrow, an installation of Haim Sokol’s (*1973) sullen poems, self-portraits on fabric, and internet photographs of Israeli soldiers donning women’s underwear left in destroyed Gazan homes. Both artists themselves have very recently been close to war: Kavelina managed to finish her film in Ukraine, even as some of her coworkers were conscripted into the military or killed; Sokol, a Russian-born Jew, emigrated to Israel after Ukraine was invaded, only to be confronted in that polity with more massacre still.
Haim Sokol, Scarecrow, 2025. Installation view, “Never Again Peace,” BAU, Graz, 2025. Photo: Mathias Völzke
Angélique Aubrit & Ludovic Beillard, Besser ein gesunder Esel als ein krankes Pferd (Better a Healthy Donkey Than a Sick Horse), 2025. Installation view, “Never Again Peace,” BAU, Graz, 2025. Photo: Mathias Völzke
Six Characters of Hotel W. Curatorial intervention, “Never Again Peace,” BAU, Graz, 2025 Photo: Mathias Völzke
Other works use fiction and playfulness to grapple with the absurdities of our past and present: Scattered throughout the building, six niches are inhabited – via letters, postcards, or espionage accounts – by six fictive personae, thought up by as many writers, that could have passed through Graz in the political turmoil after 1945 (Six Characters of Hotel W.). This kind of smart curatorial intervention is a fixture in Degot and Riff’s long-term collaboration – though here, these fictions almost seem too much on top of real histories. Angelique Aubrit (*1988) and Ludovic Beillard (*1982) stage their larger-than-life puppets in former office rooms, where, per an audio track, three weasels help a ruined banker to keep going with business after the collapse of capitalism (Better a Healthy Donkey Than a Sick Horse, 2025). Of a different hue is Ahmet Öğüt’s Sports Club of the Forbidden Colours, which smuggles the colors of certain banned flags – Kurdish, Palestinian, and queer – into the uniforms of niche sports like bed racing or hobby horsing.
The need to take a firm stand is expressed most clearly in a work by Candice Breitz (*1972), which addresses the weaponization of the term “antisemitic” to divide Western cultural sectors, and not only since 7 October 2023. In her two-part video essay Dear Esther, a work in progress, the Jewish-South African artist reaches out, via personal letters, to Esther Béjarano, a German Jew who survived Auschwitz-Birkenau by joining the camp’s Mädchenorchester (women’s orchestra) and teaching herself to play the accordion. She moved to Palestine after 1945, only to return to Germany after witnessing the violence of the Nakba firsthand, and became an antifascist activist and public critic of Israel. In the video, sequences where watermelons spell out hot-button terms (“Nakba,” “Shoah,” “Zionism”) intersect with news clippings of recent censorship in Germany, including the cancellation of Breitz’s own exhibition in Saarbrücken, and reporting on Yair Netanyahu’s ties to the global far right. As a tribute to the activist, who passed away in 2021, Breitz attempted to learn on the accordion the song that kept Béjarano alive, and which she later returned to musically as “a kind of revenge”: “Bel Ami” (1939).
Still from Candice Breitz, Dear Esther, 2025, 4K video, stereo sound, 9 min.
Michiel Vandevelde, Pankaj Tiwari, and Eneas Prawdzic, Violenza 2025, 2025. Performance documentation, “Never Peace Again,” Orpheum, Graz, 2025. Photo: Clara Wildberger
On the third evening of performances, for Violenza 2025, choreographer Michiel Vandevelde (*1990), theater-maker Pankaj Tiwari (*1990), and dramaturg Eneas Prawdzic (*1989) gave the stage to five young men dressed in business casual. Over the following hour, they came to imitate, with escalating agitation, a cable-TV panel rehearsing too-familiar arguments on homeland, migration, and the “terror of the left.” Eventually stripping to their underwear, they struck a grotesque pose straight out of Leni Riefenstahl, before collapsing into a showdown equal parts homoerotic slapstick and drunken fight. The piece ended with a chapter from Ernst Toller’s Eine Jugend in Deutschland (A Youth in Germany, 1933), an autobiography tracking the rise of Nazism, being read aloud, then lit aflame. “You think this is over when the light goes out?” asks one of the performers with a grin. “Go home. Tomorrow it will just be starting.”
Across modes of storytelling, fiction, irony, and play, as well as omissions and tensions, “Never Again Peace” does not shy away from addressing the elephant in the room: How to make art in the face of genocide? Considering the generally self-poisoning climate in so many Western cultural contexts, and specifically the censorship of voices critical of Israel’s war, it was a relief to see works in Graz that, to borrow from Pablo Larios’s review of the latest, stridently avoidant Berlin Biennale, are not “so removed from their own political moment, and ours,” but address current conflicts from within – be it in Graz, Ukraine, Israel/Palestine, Germany, or elsewhere.
“Never Again Peace”: steirischer herbst 2025
Various venues, Graz
18 Sep – 12 Oct 2025