Arts & Culture

To flee is to escape and it holds the promise of freedom from war and crisis. Seeking refuge does not always work and more often than not it is just the beginning of an arduous journey. The way to a better and peaceful future leads most people into reception camps of inhumane conditions. Expecting protection and help there, they find themselves far from rebuilding a new existence. This disgraceful setting is visualised at EFA23 by Deborah Sengl’s installation of an actual refugee tent, in which a sound installation immerses visitor in the situation.

In the first days of the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine, Ukrainian photographer Elena Subach was part of a group of volunteers supporting refugees in Uzhgorod near the Ukrainian-Slovakian border. She began to take pictures of the improvised architecture that developed to meet an urgent need. Abandoned chairs seemed to Subach like ‘islands among waves of people, that is, places where one could stop and rest for a moment’. The ‘Chairs’ series tells a powerful story of displacement and war, but also of compassion and empathy with people in need.

A sound installation that aims to shed light on ocean noise pollution and its detrimental effects on marine life, featuring audio archives from various experts including marine biologists, scientists, and sound artists. The recordings will be played in the bathrooms of the Congress Centrum Alpbach, creating a juxtaposition between the raw sounds of the ocean and the intrusion of human activity into the underwater environment.

Sharafi works in different modes, favouring improvisation as well as composing for films or working with ensembles. She is inspired by an interdisciplinary genre aesthetic, a concept opening new windows to a synesthetic world, where different aesthetic languages in different mediums merge, mingle and eventually create a new aesthetic.

A creation for the “At(tent)ion” installation by Deborah Sengl: sound reveals that the space is a multifaceted territory, a room that encapsulates countless spaces within its walls. Some of these spaces represent the remnants of the past, the places left behind that etch their mark on the journey. Other areas sound like the future we wish for, the promised paradisiacal future; and there is the room that surrounds us and shapes our present reality. The interconnectedness of these rooms is created by the traveler's voices, stories, natures, realities, and dreams.

What would it mean to redistribute or even “collectivise” extinction in terms of policy and governance? A series of painted posters confronts the unequal distribution of extinction: The climate catastrophe disproportionately impacts the global south, Indigenous peoples and people of colour, women, LGBTQIA+ communities and the poor. What should go extinct is not us, but the fossil industries and neocolonial mindset that produced the climate catastrophe in the first place.

‘Bataille’ is an interactive installation that explores the power of words taken from protest banners and placards found on the internet. Each word represents an entire statement, a struggle or a slogan. Imbued with influences from the artist’s native Brazil, Rivane Neuenschwander combines the poetic tradition of repente, an oral form of improvised poetry, with concrete poetry. Participants are invited to improvise and use words to transform the installation into a theatre of transgression and everyday political protest.

‘Bataille’ by Rivane Neuenschwander is presented in cooperation with Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein / purchased by the Foundation "Friends of Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein“ for Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein.