Partner Program

As always, the festival program of steirischer herbst is accompanied by a rich and varied Partner Program presented by local cultural institutions and artists. Twenty-nine projects in Graz and Styria are part of this yearʼs festival.

Exhibitions

Akademie Graz
Marie Vermont
UNDER-MINING

UNDER-MINING digs in and around concepts of Allmende (the commons) and appropriation, excavating various undergrounds and psychoacoustic landscapes. Here—oscillating between the visible and audible, the porous and manifest, temporality and materiality—the layers beneath us are undermined and their contours redrawn.

APORON 21
die prekARTe ’26
Brache / Kultur / G’stättn

prekARTe ’26 is: applied research into artistic strategies for surviving contemporary life in the slipstream of speculation, crises, and wars.

Camera Austria
Valérie Jouve
The Outside Inside

In her photographic installations, Valérie Jouve embarks on an anthropological journey through a space where human beings, architecture, and nature are equally important as markers of identity. By combining landscape with portraiture, the artist creates visual realms beyond reportage and new points of view.

esc medien kunst labor
(RE)NEW: Part II

(RE)NEW showcases international media art projects that understand renewal and transformation as processes that are constantly reorganizing themselves in the interplay between humans, technology, and nature. Beyond aesthetic and sensory perception, these projects give us the confidence that the future is open and malleable.

Grazer Kunstverein
Martin Maloney

Martin Maloney, curated by Yana Foqué, presents key works by the early conceptual artist Martin Maloney (1938–2003) in what is his first solo exhibition within an institutional context. The exhibition approaches his practice by focusing on his correspondence and situating his work within a broader art historical field.

Graz Museum
Morgen war alles besser. Im Graz der 70er (Everything Was Better Tomorrow: The 1970s in Graz)

Based on eleven places, the exhibition tells the story of life in Graz in the 1970s. What did it mean to dismantle old structures and implement reforms? What challenges and crises did the residents face? What was let go, and what was preserved? What still has an impact today?

HDA – Haus der Architektur
Holzbau Architektur mit MENSCH. ORT. HAUS. VERSTAND. (Wooden Architecture)

The exhibition holistically examines selected architectures, highlighting which social, cultural, spatial, and structural aspects are necessary to build with wood in a manner that is environmentally, economically, and socially sustainable.

KULTUMUSEUM Graz
TOHUWABOHU. Silence & Violence (No Museum Has God – Selection Two)

With TOHUWABOHU – Chaos, a series of works based on the Old Testament, the KULTUMUSEUM presents Eilfried Huth as a painter. Together with collection interventions by Elisabeth Gschiel on Silence & Violence, it punctuates the second selection of No Museum Has God.

Kunsthaus Graz
30% Dandelion

Beauty, strength, and defiant resilience: Learning from dandelions means seeing the strong connection between flowers and humans—we share 30 percent of our genetic material. Amid ecological crises, colonial aftermaths, and digital acceleration, the exhibition calls for new attention—poetically, politically, and ecologically.

Art in Public Space Styria (Griesgasse 40)
Widerstand aufstellen? / Ustanovitev odpora? (Putting Up Resistance?)

For nearly eighty years, a bronze stood in a Carinthian basement before being identified as a partisan monument. Now the sculpture is shown to the public, which is facing the question: What does the statue represent, what does it commemorate, and, above all, where should it be placed?

Kunstraum TROST
Jakob Kolb
Vessels: Engine Room

A memory device at Kunsthaus TROST: Vessels: Engine Room transforms live performances into audiovisual memories circulating through space. Acoustic moments are stored in a sculptural system and left to the ravages of time.

kunstverein W.A.S. and raum
Maryam Farhang
if I had a body …

A multidisciplinary installation and performance explores the body as witness and archive, shaped by the trauma of the Iran–Iraq War. Through distorted self-imaging and parallels with Gaza, body, light, and textiles confront starvation, erasure, and ethnic cleansing—transforming inherited violence into memory and resistance.

manuskripte
pars pro toto: Reliquien lebender Autor:innen (Relics of Living Writers)

Glass eyes, photos, or pencils after all? Four writers provide the literary magazine manuskripte with their own relics along with explanatory texts, thereby regaining control of the interpretation of their work, if not their life.

QL-Galerie
Esther Strauß
Oma war kein Nazi (Grandma Wasn’t a Nazi)

When Esther Strauß asked her grandmother if she had been a member of the Nazi party, the latter said no—later it turned out she had been. What is the performativity of lies? What does it mean to grow up with them? Strauß’s exhibition explores women as perpetrators, as well as the buried Nazi history of Leechgasse 24.

RHIZOM
Marc Bertel
Everything Is Everythang

A meditation on relations, love and loss, this filmic collage revolves around the artist’s extended family in South Central LA. Utilizing a documentary approach while wrestling with the notion of opacity, the film points to art's potency as a tool to foster community, unimpaired by the specters of race and class.

< rotor > Zentrum für zeitgenössische Kunst
A Parable for Endings and Beginnings We Don’t Know Yet, Part 2: The Colossal Land Animal

The exhibition takes its cue from a creature that appears in mythological tales as a colossal land animal. Inspired by the writings of Báyò Akómoláfé, it navigates the tension between heaviness and transformation, grounding and oversaturation, as well as order and carnivalesque dissolution.

SAMA Kollektiv
Open Window

Open Window is an exhibition format by SAMA Kollektiv that focuses on artworks addressing housing and property as contested political issues. As part of the co nullvier art and culture festival, the exhibition takes place at the Studentisches Wohnungsservice (SWS) kiosk.

Schaumbad – Freies Atelierhaus Graz
All Monsters Are Human: The Grotesque Within Us

This exhibition looks into fear, violence, death, and inner darkness—not to shock, but to reveal. Through grotesque worlds and human monsters, it offers catharsis, understanding, and hope in a time that often feels monstrous.

University of Graz (Graz School for Interdisciplinary Transnational Studies)
Carolyn Defrin in collaboration with NOMIS Research Project Elastic Borders
Portals to the Future

Portals to the Future is an artistic intervention and exhibition exploring how we might imagine more humane futures for migration. Across the city, everyday doorways become portals into immersive audio futures, while a multimedia art exhibition explores collective future-making.

ZIEGEL
The 4th Block. International Triennial of the Ecological Poster

The Chornobyl disaster is not a date but a fracture in history and a challenge to our values. Forty years later, we ask: who is responsible, and what is the cost of silence? The exhibition addresses consequences, memory as action, and ecology as ethics, featuring works by designers from around the world.

Performances

KRA
Mission Mustang: Ein Roadmovie im Autokino (A Road Movie at the Drive-in)

KRA solves all the world’s conflicts! This time at the drive-in. Mission Mustang is a live road movie about saying goodbye to cars and everything they stand for. About the end of a great love that has become toxic, yet still smells of freedom. Together we’re going on one last road trip.

Kunsthaus Graz
Discussique: Blumen hören
Nachsaat

Discussique: Listening to Flowers traces flower metaphors across cultures and—through the interplay of artistic research, space, the audience, and plants—explores new forms of listening, making music, and exchange. Following the Planting and Blooming phases, Re-Seeding is the final chapter.

Oper Graz
Hector Berlioz
La Damnation de Faust

With Johannes Braun conducting the Graz Philharmonic Orchestra, director Lorenzo Fioroni stages Hector Berlioz’s ultimate Faustian apocalypse in a spatial installation by the multi-award-winning set designer Sebastian Hannak.

Das Planetenparty Prinzip
The Balkan Peak Resort: Skifahren wie im schönen Österreich (Skiing Just Like in Beautiful Austria)

A ski resort in Albania, funded by Austrian capital: Does the region actually benefit from it? Based on the example of the fictional Balkan Peak Resort, the performance deconstructs the master narrative of “development aid.” A show about colonial continuities and the persistence of stereotypes.

Schauspielhaus Graz
Ewe Benbenek
ФielföلkaŠtát (äh, vielvölkastaat, oder was?)

What does it mean to be part of Europe today? Who is considered to be “from here”—and who is not? Ewe Benbenek explores the history of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and connects it to current issues of work, migration, and belonging.

Discourse

Forum Stadtpark
Alerta! Conference on Contemporary Fascism and Possibilities for Resistance

When antifascism is delegitimized and criminalized, a response from the broad mass of society is needed. The conference Alerta! brings together current analyses of fascist and authoritarian developments with approaches to collective counterstrategies.

Partners in Styria

Haus Lebt 2026
Dear Future,
Art and culture festival

Haus Lebt is an art and culture festival in an unfinished, gutted, historically protected Baroque house. The construction site becomes a stage and the festival opening a roofing ceremony as we come to terms with uncertainty: “Dear Future, we don’t believe that we are not meant to live in Hartberg.”

Art in Public Space Styria and ASIST
Milica Tomić
Aflenz Memorial

On the former site of the Aflenz concentration camp—a subcamp of Mauthausen—a walkable landscape memorial is being created under the artistic direction of Milica Tomić. Here, nature itself becomes a vessel for memory, revealing what has been inscribed into the ground.

Pavelhaus
Der Tunnelblick – tunelski vid – Tunnel Vision: Of Helicopters, Memories, Holes, and Plenty of Language(s)
Exhibition

Tunnel Vision invites readers on a journey through the gaps in history and contemporary consciousness, forging new connections between Carinthia and Styria—with a detour to mark the Chornobyl disaster’s fortieth anniversary and a kaki tree for peace.