Ulla von Brandenburg, Slavs and Tatars, Tarek Atoui

From May 13 to June 18, 2022, the Wiener Festwochen are opening up a space for daring artistic creations to be envisioned and shared with diverse audiences. This year, the Wiener Festwochen have commissioned a number of visual artists to develop new works which generate meaningful dialogues between artistic disciplines as well as with the architecture and institutional context of the city of Vienna itself.

German artist Ulla von Brandenburg combines her fine arts practice with rarely performed vocal and choir works by Arnold Schoenberg. Von Brandenburg trained as a scenographer, and her work is characterised by a diversity of means and media such as performance, collage, textiles and film. For Friede auf Erden (Piece on Earth), she has brought performers and spatial interventions to the Jugendstiltheater am Steinhof, creating an almost synaesthetic experience featuring movement, colours and sound. The music is performed by the outstanding Arnold Schoenberg Choir.

The artist collective Slavs and Tatars is opening a Pickle Bar. For five weeks, this Slav version of an Italian aperitivo bar is serving pickled delicacies and fermented juices and showcasing local and international artists exploring the limits of ideologies and the boundaries of belief systems within this sour, if not salty, setting. Following the close affinity between speaking and eating, Vienna’s Pickle Bar is to stage performances by Nora Turato, Selin Davasse, Veronika Merklein & Ela A. Sattler, Mai Ling, Onur Karaoğlu and host the adO/Aptive reading group.

An essential aspect of Lebanese artist Tarek Atoui’s practice revolves around designing musical instruments, challenging traditional ways of making music and the act of listening. For his new collaborative work Souffle Continu (Continous Breath), he has created a set of new instruments that generate sound through the flow of air. In a series of four concerts staged in such diverse settings as a prestigious concert hall, a techno club and a football pitch, he collaborates with local musicians from different genres and is joined by a group of deaf amateur musicians. Together they explore how sound behaves at the boundaries of the audible, what resonances it triggers in its surroundings, and how the very act of listening actually works.

The Wiener Festwochen programme does not start from a particular discipline; rather, it strives for a crossover of artistic languages. Widely acclaimed artists present new works alongside emerging figures, who in turn are shaping the artistic practices of the future. Overall, the festival aims to form a general “score” that activates dialogue and friction between positions and aesthetics.