8010 Graz
Austria
Every autumn since 1968, steirischer herbst has provided a platform for new productions, provoking and shaping public debates in various forms across disciplines and media. Reinventing itself many times over, the festival has always redefined the terms of the conversation about what culture might mean in a changing contemporaneity.
From its beginnings, steirischer herbst stood out as one of the world’s few interdisciplinary art festivals. Fostering dialogue between the arts by combining aesthetic positions with theoretical reflection, the festival’s various editions have integrated visual art, music, public art, theater, performance, new media, literature, and everything in between.
Part of what has made steirischer herbst unique is its engagement with Styria and the city of Graz. As such, it has regularly featured work that delves into the city’s uneven present and its complex, sometimes troubling past.
The festival pursues a critical agenda and supports practices that are engaged and engaging without simply being a platform for alternative politics. Instead, it aims to turn Grazinto a stage upon which art’s unique imaginative potential—its capacity to tell wild stories and shift shapes, to make impossible conjectures and poetic jokes, to take over spaces and occupy the imagination—is on full view.