The Blue Flower
12% choreography
73% art
15% utopia


At the beginning of the twentieth century, artistic avant-gardes demonstrated that new awareness gives rise to new forms. Some assumed that this process is reversible: from distribution of a form to new general awareness. The construction of a new understanding of space as an allegory of work on a new reality. But when do forms become authoritarian ornaments? Formalisms that organise common mind-sets so as to choreograph society as a mass?
“The Blue Flower” constitutes a quiet space in the festival, made up of some old and some new artistic works that seek utopia in form and that recognise a yearning for a different reality in abstraction.
The starting-point for this essayistic space-ensemble is the attempt to create a carpet, following in the vein of a graphic design by Bauhaus artist Anni Albers. What remains of the idea embodied by this design? Is there a representation of the self beyond its status as social capital?
Albers’ carpet and the works surrounding it open up their own angles on the complex connection between formal questions and the desire for a good life, the search for the blue flower.


Co-produced by steirischer herbst & Grazer Kunstverein
With kind support from Muzeum Sztuki, Lódz


22/09 - 15/12

Tue - Sun 10 am - 6 pm
Thu 10 am - 8 pm


Grazer Kunstverein
With
Saim Demircan (D/UK), Heidrun Holzfeind (A), Katarzyina Kobro (PL), Hilary Lloyd (UK), Vaclav Pozarek (CH/CZ), Florian Roithmayr (UK/D), Lasse Schmidt Hansen (D/DK), Juliane Solmsdorf (D)

Curated by
Søren Grammel (A/D)

Grazer Kunstverein

22/09 - 15/12

Tue - Sun 10 am - 6 pm
Thu 10 am - 8 pm


Grazer Kunstverein

With
Saim Demircan (D/UK), Heidrun Holzfeind (A), Katarzyina Kobro (PL), Hilary Lloyd (UK), Vaclav Pozarek (CH/CZ), Florian Roithmayr (UK/D), Lasse Schmidt Hansen (D/DK), Juliane Solmsdorf (D)

Curated by
Søren Grammel (A/D)

Grazer Kunstverein