Exhibition

The steirischer herbst ’25 exhibition takes place in the former Bauer distillery in Gries—a district traditionally home to many migrants, but where the far right won the last elections. For the festival, the building is renamed BAU. This word has many meanings in German—from den to construction site to prison—just as the site was used for many purposes. It housed manufacturing rooms, glass-door offices, and, strangely, police apartments. This bizarre assemblage of spaces, stairs, doors, and dead ends implies different ways of life and value systems.

The exhibition explores these connotations and invites visitors to immerse themselves in a wide variety of stories as they climb the numerous floors. In the curatorial imagination, the winding building recalls at times a ship on which antifascists fled occupied France, at times an Alpine fortress to which the Right withdraws like at the end of World War II, at times a Magic Mountain–like sanatorium with its precarious hope, and at times a hotel whose guests are waiting for their uncertain transit.

The BAU can be understood as a metaphor for a fragmented and polarized society: we live on different decks and yet travel together on the “boat of history” into an uncertain future.