"The exhibition A War in the Distance, the central project of the 2022 edition of steirischer herbst, took place at Neue Galerie Graz / Universalmuseum Joanneum and invited visitors to engage with historical and contemporary works directly or indirectly about wars past and present. Confronting lesser-known 19th- and 20th-century paintings from Neue Galerie Graz’s collection with works made by artists today, it uncovered hidden stories from the uncomfortable past. Throughout, Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine was ever present, like a filter, impossible to erase or forget. The richly illustrated catalogue A War in the Distance documents this exhibition, its Ukraine-focused prologue, as well the surrounding festival program of performances and further exhibitions. Short texts by the curators are accompanied, among others, by essays by Alice Crary, Gudrun Danzer, Heimo Halbrainer, Tom Holert, Günther Holler-Schuster, Éva Kovács, Daniel Muzyczuk, and an interview with Manfried Rauchensteiner."-- Provided by publisher.
"Useful disruption and productive conflict have always been part of steirischer herbst—an institution that has sparked dialogue time and again throughout its history. Every autumn since its founding half a century ago, the festival has provided a platform for new productions, provoking and shaping public debates in a variety of forms across disciplines and media. Reinventing itself many times over, steirischer herbst has always redefined the terms of the conversation about what culture might mean in a changing contemporaneity, as seen in Graz, Austria’s second most populous city. [...] From its very beginnings, steirischer herbst stood out as one of the world’s few interdisciplinary art festivals, long before the fashionable overuse of the term. Fostering dialogue between the arts by combining aesthetic positions with theoretical reflection, the festival’s various iterations have integrated visual art, music, art in public space, theater, performance, new media, literature, and everything in between, with an emphasis on one field or the other varying over the years. This point remains central to the festival’s approach today, as it emphasizes work that refuses to be bound by the rules and traditional scope of separate cultural fields."-- Website steirischer herbst.