Volksgarten
Politics of belonging
80% visual arts
14% public space
6% neighbourhood


“Volksgarten. Politics of Belonging” aims at depicting a monographic portrait of Lend and Gries, the city districts where Kunsthaus Graz is being located. The title concept of “Volksgarten” implicates an abstract and a concrete site of an open and democratic space where a variety of identities is being shaped and consequently negotiated. Ethnically complex, multicultural and socially diverse, Lend and Gries function as a metaphor of urban, political, cultural and national transformations. The exhibition is going to investigate identification systems and strategies of belonging within given differentiated neighbourhoods and communities. What are the forms of co-habitation? How social utopias are being constructed? What are the possible scenarios of collective and communal life? “Volksgarten” is a playground where a complex production of social space occurs: here, the legality and legitimacy of space are being tested; here, too, space’s accessibility is challenged through a dense network of multiply human relations on the crossway of local and global economies.


Co-produced by steirischer herbst & Kunsthaus Graz


22/09 - 13/01/08
Kunsthaus Graz, Space02 / public space
Tue - Sun 10 am - 6 pm


Kunsthaus Graz
With
Airline (CH), Pawel Althamer (PL), Kutlug Ataman (TR), Bik van der Pol (NL), Los Carpinteros (CU), Thomas Hirschhorn (CH), Helmut & Johanna Kandl (A), Sharon Lockhart (USA), Maria Papadimitriou (GR), Daniel Roth (D), Manfred Willmann (A) et al.

Curated by
Adam Budak (A/PL), Peter Pakesch (A) & Katia Schurl (A)

Kunsthaus Graz