12 July 2022

Culture festival 'steirischer herbst' presents video art and films by Ukrainian artists at the exhibition 'A War in the Distance. Prologue' at Neue Galerie Graz (1 July - 1 August 2022)

On Monday this week, the gas supply through Nord Stream was stopped by Russia due maintenance works on the pipeline. This happens regularly every year and wouldn't be further observed if there wasn't the war in Ukraine and a sanctions match between Europe and Russia. The war appears once again a step closer to Austria. The war of nerves has started. Governments and people prepare already for the upcoming autumn, winter months when the expected restrictions of gas will make homes colder and industries slow down. War has many faces and the suffering of people in regions where the war hits with raw brutality of weapons radiates like from a bleeding wound to other parts of the world. In Austria, people think about colder apartments and job losses while in other regions like in Africa or the Middle East the shortage of food and famines have already increased with the blockade of grain exports from Ukraine. Also people in Europe have started to starve caused by the inflation and the enormously growing prices of energy and consequently the costs of food. Living in general has become more expensive due the devaluation of money. The poverty of the masses, which already reached the large middle class, isn't visible yet; but the people know there is a hard time to come. To deal with the crisis, arts and culture initiatives have started to look at the war from different angles in the search for hope.

'A War in the Distance' is this year's title of the culture festival 'steirischer herbst' (22 September - 16 October) which has been held since 1968 in the capital city of Styria in Graz and the region around. In 2022, chief curator, director Ekaterina Degot and the curator team of steirischer herbst developed the programme from the war-history of Styria from the 60s to nowadays. The years of Cold War, Yugoslav Wars, but also World War I and World War II are topics for the creation of the profile of the region which is now indirectly affected by the currently ongoing war in Ukraine. This year, the festival theme is introduced by the prologue exhibition 'A War in the Distance. Prologue. An Embattled Ukraine in Video Art and Film' (1 July until 1 August at the Neue Galerie Graz) with the show of views by Ukrainian artists such as Dana Kavelina who combines at her art film 'Letter to a Turtledove' (2020) documentary footage and elements of poetry for telling about the beginning of the war in 2014 in Ukraine and the tragedy of violence.

"Documentary films show the human dimension of how the war impacts economically depressed regions and the people who live there, revealing that there is a space for hope, heroism, and poetry in spite of the widespread destruction," is the exhibition introduced at steirischerherbst.at/en/program/3541/a-war-in-the-distance-prologue.

Image: Sujet of the 'steirischer herbst' 2022 by the design collective 'Grupa Ee'.