Horror Patriae
Exhibition
20.9.24–16.2.25
Neue Galerie Graz
Joanneumsviertel
8010 Graz ♿
Tue–Sun 10:00–18:00
12/11/5,50 euros
(free admission under 19)
19.9., 18:00–20:00
Vernissage
With music by Mélange Oriental
Free admission
20.9., 11:30–15:30
Artist Talks
In English
Free admission
25.9., 2.10., 9.10.,
23.10., 6.11., 20.11.,
17:00–18:00
Expert talks
Free admission
National museums are haunted houses. Established by empires and states that have long since ceased to exist, they served to construct and confirm national myths. Even if the world is constantly changing, former delusions of grandeur and petty grievances of the past are often still at play there.
The exhibition Horror Patriae is a centerpiece of steirischer herbst ’24. It examines a darker side of patriotism in all its forms, all over the world. Its venue is the historical building of the Joanneum (today Universalmuseum Joanneum). Founded in 1811 as an Enlightenment-era museum with an educational function, the Joanneum was the center of what historian Benedict Anderson calls an “imagined community.” As Anderson argues in his inspirational book of the same name, all nation-states as we know them are inventions, works of collective imagination by the educated class. Museums, as well as novels, newspapers, and theater plays, are sites of these construction works.
In this world of imaginary states, the one the Joanneum represented was especially ephemeral: Styria was a province rather than a state, although at some point in history, during the Renaissance, Graz was the capital of a territory called Inner Austria that included parts of current Italy and Slovenia. The museum’s founder, Archduke Johann (1782–1859), strongly promoted local patriotism over the even vaguer identity of a large multiethnic empire. Still, in a surprisingly universalist way of thinking, he stressed the necessity of learning from all countries—notably in the area of crafts and technologies—and structured the museum as a catalog of achievements worthy of study.
The Joanneum’s later history was all about tensions between the local and the cosmopolitan. It saw the institution become a prestigious “high art” museum in the 1880s and, in 1913, open a department of everyday rural life. It witnessed, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the museum’s turn to Pan-Germanism, which facilitated the Anschluss and, in the 1950s, the paradoxical revival of Inner Austria, this time as a purely imaginary alliance.
Referring to these histories and many others local and international, Horror Patriae imagines an alternative museum of national complexes and perverse imaginaries. The exhibition combines works and artifacts from the Universalmuseum Joanneum’s various collections with works by contemporary artists and is organized into several fictitious departments. Is this museum of dysfunctional and contradictory nationhood the only way to imagine a national museum in a time like ours, when patriotic sentiments are getting good press, even if they have a darker side?
Curated by Ekaterina Degot, David Riff, Gábor Thury, and Pieternel Vermoortel, assisted by Beatrice Forchini and Tobias Ihl
Consultants: Ulrich Becker, Ulrike Hausl-Hoffstätter, Eva Maria Hois, Herwig G. Höller, Günther Holler-Schuster, Birgit Johler, Karin Leitner-Ruhe, David Nayer, Wolfgang Paill, Barbara Porod, Barbara Seyerl
A cooperation between steirischer herbst ’24 and Neue Galerie Graz / Universalmuseum Joanneum
Heimat Temple
There is nothing neutral about names given to places of origin. The Latin word patria can refer to a city, village, or even the house you were born in. Its German translation, Vaterland (fatherland), already sounds more official, like a nation with borders and an army that will ask a sacrifice of you. The German word Heimat (literally, homeland) is special, to the extent that it has become known in English, too.
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Department of Mild Megalomania
In a 16th-century painting, Austria thrones over both Europe and Africa, defying logic and geography. The painting’s hierarchy is based upon different rules, a premodern world in which there are neither passports nor borders nor national languages. Peasants identified with their villages, while the ruling classes thought of themselves in more abstract terms: through allegiance to a dynasty.
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Gallery of Timid Modernity
With its eclectic historicism, 19th-century architecture gave individual and state customers a vast palette of aesthetics to identify with. Often, the choice of style was a political statement. For the multiethnic Habsburg monarchy, neoclassicism was the universal language of bureaucracy and power, allegedly neutral and nonnational. This was precisely the reason it became universally hated in the mid-19th century, when the “German national” style was championed by the oppositional bourgeoisie.
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Cabinet of Peaks and Hills
It was the European Romantics who first grew to appreciate the spectacle of high mountains rather than seeing them as a logistical obstacle. As early as the mid-18th century, English philosopher Edmund Burke (1729–1797) connected mountains to the idea of the sublime—a form of nonclassical, modern beauty that contains a terrifying, superhuman element.
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Directorate of Nations
Long before nation-states existed, people were fascinated if not obsessed with the classification of national characters. Early pseudoscientific typologies were often based on false assumptions about differences in climate and geography. They were also often racist—toward Blacks and Jews, in the first place, but also toward Eastern and Southern Europeans.
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Ward of Wild Fantasies
A fascination with the alleged “wild” exoticism of other cultures and climes runs through European history. Regional museums such as the Joanneum collected exotic artifacts and rare taxidermy specimens from all over the world. This fascination—several examples from different epochs can be seen in this room—was often fed by naivete, ignorance, and racism.
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Chamber of Improbable Patriots
Every region and country has poets, writers, or artists it worships as national icons—disregarding the contradictions at their core. But Austria has, at every moment of its history, known a cohort of writers and artists whose attitude toward their homeland was radically critical, up to becoming almost an aversion to it.
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Section of Brown Flags
Today, no political party would dream of using brown as their color, as it has painful associations with Nazis: it was the color of the colonial surplus uniforms worn by storm troopers in the 1920s and 1930s. Yet, scratch any surface in postfascist Germany or Austria, and you might find brown uniforms and other attributes of the Third Reich, like in the painting by Johannes Wohlfart (1900–1975) exhibited in this room.
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steirischerherbst’24
steirischerherbst’24