Afterwards: new TV portrait “Karl Kraus – The Power of the Word” for his 150th birthday – on April 22nd from 10:30 p.m., ORF 2
Vienna (OTS) – The “kulturMontag” presented by Clarissa Stadler on April 22, 2024 at 10:30 p.m. on ORF 2 will, among other things, provide an outlook on the upcoming anniversary edition of the Venice Art Biennale, which is overshadowed by current political developments. The program also deals with the dramatization of Ágota Kristóf’s anti-war novel “The Big Booklet”, which Jacqueline Kornmüller is bringing to the stage of the Vienna Odeon. The director is a live guest in the studio. The program also features a portrait of the successful Upper Austrian band Bipolar Feminin, which will soon be awarded the FM4 Amadeus Award. The new documentary “Karl Kraus – The Power of the Word” (11:15 p.m.) will then be on the program to mark the 150th birthday of the sharp-tongued critic, media maker and writer. When creating the film, AI systems were used to bring Karl Kraus to life using sound recordings of his original voice or photos from which short film sequences were generated and to let his own quotes speak.
Strangers Everywhere – 60th Venice Biennale
At the end of April, the Venice Biennale opens its doors for the 60th time. Brazilian chief curator Adriano Pedrosa calls his edition of the oldest international art exhibition “Strangers Everywhere” and for the first time focuses on the global south. Otherwise it is the global north that sets the tone in the Giardini, as it does in the entire art world. This is exactly what Pedrosa wants to counteract with his biennial and focuses on artists who are themselves foreigners, immigrants, expatriates, emigrants, exiles or refugees – especially those who have moved between the global south and the global north. Even before the opening, the topic and participants caused controversy. The nations bring their conflicts with them. The increasingly escalating war in the Middle East, which is also dividing the art world, is perceived as particularly burning. The “Art Not Genocide” alliance has been campaigning against the Jewish state’s participation in the art biennale since mid-February and is calling for the exclusion of Israel, including demonstrations. The Israeli Biennale team led by artist Ruth Patir has locked its pavilion and only wants to reopen it once a ceasefire in the Gaza war has been agreed and the Jewish hostages held by the Islamist Hamas have been released. The requested policy strongly condemns the protests and emphasizes the Biennale as a space of freedom and dialogue and not as a place of censorship and intolerance.
Since the war of aggression against Ukraine, Russia has not taken part in the international art show. What is new, however, is that Putin’s empire is handing over its pavilion to Bolivia for free this year. One of the few South American countries, which is one of the poorest and structurally weakest on the continent, has never been represented in Venice before. But the art world suspects less of a grand gesture behind it and more of a geopolitical struggle for resources. Russia, like other world powers, is trying to gain access to Bolivia’s extensive lithium reserves – an important raw material for key technologies.
Almost 90 country pavilions are dedicated to the general theme of the Biennale. Austria is represented by Anna Jermolaewa, who had to flee the USSR to Austria in 1989 as a political opposition figure and has been working as an artist here ever since. In her work, she deals with Tchaikovsky’s ballet “Swan Lake” – in Russia a means, a cipher, for practicing silent resistance and rebelling against the regime ruling there without words. Does the time demand signs of political resistance and cohesion, be it as danced dissidence on the ballet stage? What does the titular “foreigner” mean for a society? Does this invalidate any nationalism?
Courageous fight for survival – Ágota Kristóf’s “The Great Issue” at the Odeon
It is a poignant and raw story that the Hungarian writer Ágota Kristóf chronicles in her novel “The Great Notebook”. In it she traces the fate of two adolescent twin brothers who are taken by their mother to their grandmother in the country during the war and who quickly have to learn what it takes to survive. The war, the escape and its consequences were also the author’s life theme: uprooting, loneliness and cruelty shaped Ágota Kristóf, who was 21 years old after the anti-Soviet Hungarian uprising of 1956 with her husband, who was also an oppositionist, and who lived for four months at the time old daughter had to flee to Switzerland. Kristóf was already over 50 when her first novel was published; It was supposed to be her most captivating, truest and most brutal, because it brought out everything that characterizes her as a narrator to the greatest advantage. The German director Jacqueline Kornmüller, who made a name for herself here with her interdisciplinary and intercultural projects such as the Ganymede series, knew when the book was published in 1986 that she would bring this extraordinary text to the stage at some point. She adapted the material for the stage of the Odeon Theater and discovered the Cuban twin sisters Miriam and Mercedes Varga, who have been part of the Serapionstheater since the 1990s, for the main roles. An ideal choice for Kornmüller, as her biography shows clear parallels to the touching story. Clarissa Stadler talks to the director live in the studio about the anti-war piece, about escape and uprooting.
Force of nature from Ebensee – The band Bipolar Feminin on the road to success
The four of them look harmless, but they are friendly, courteous, funny and modest. However, their music is the opposite:
disturbing, unforgiving, her texts radically authentic. The four Upper Austrians from the Salzkammergut call themselves bipolar feminine. The 27-year-old front woman Leni Ulrich, the band’s singer, guitarist and lyricist, is a vocal hurricane. With insults and anger, she verbally lets off a lot of steam or expresses her frustration with capitalism, which degrades people into consumerism, or takes a reckoning with the patriarchy that still reigns. Bipolar Feminin confidently navigate the wide spectrum of accessibility and challenge. Even the band name may be confusing. The group from Ebensee was concerned with two poles that rub against each other, but are still one, as Ulrich summarizes their artistic work. It is the field of friction that interests the musicians, not just the pure rejection. Electric guitars dominate in their frayed indie rock to grunge punk, which is sometimes reminiscent of Oasis or Nirvana. The quartet was founded in Vienna five years ago because Bipolar Feminin wanted to quickly escape the idyll of the Salzkammergut, which was perceived as deceptive. Her first EP, “Piccolo Family,” was released in 2022, and the debut album “A Fragile System” is now available and is enjoying success. For this, the band will soon be honored with the FM4 Amadeus Award.
New TV portrait “Karl Kraus – The Power of the Word” (11:15 p.m.)
Karl Kraus was an all-round journalist: journalist, poet, playwright, satirist, visionary, newspaper editor, critic and media pioneer. And he was a person full of contradictions and attitudes that would be extremely offensive today. The film “Karl Kraus – The Power of the Word” by Franz Gruber and Susanne Pleisnitzer gets very close to this uncomfortable figure, through people – artists and researchers – who gain access to him and his work have developed.
Karl Kraus is hardly read at all these days. His sentence structure is too twisted, the content too time-related. Nevertheless, he dealt with social questions that are still relevant today. Despite all this, there is a tight-knit community that invests a lot of love, time and money in researching his life – including young people.
It is the contradictions that become apparent when dealing with Kraus and pose a mystery. There is his transformation from loyal to the Kaiser to one of the first opponents of the war during the First World War, or from a supporter of social democracy to an eloquent supporter of the Austro-fascist dictator Engelbert Dollfuß. Another contradiction is his dogged fight against corruption in the newspaper industry, while with the self-published “Torch” he practices exactly what is now called “outrage management” – one of the business foundations of tabloid journalism.
There are the expressions of love from his long-time lover Sidonie Nádherná von Borutín, which at times were perceived as oppressive, while one does not have to look far for misogynistic statements in his work. There are anti-Semitic statements, even though Kraus himself has Jewish roots. And there is the technology skeptic who, when the Titanic sank and other occasions, castigated his contemporaries’ blind faith in progress – but soon became one of Austria’s first frequent flyers himself.
Those speaking include Katharina Prager, proven Kraus expert and Kraus estate administrator, Isabel Langkabel, enthusiastic Kraus researcher, quote researcher and blogger Gerald Krieghofer, cabaret artist Hosea Ratschiller and castle actor Cornelius Obonya. 88 years after the death of the controversial publicist, this film answers the question of whether there is someone else behind the far-sighted and sharp-sighted, loudly rumbling, intellectually often overwhelming and seemingly egomaniacal figure who is worth discovering.