Press Information Version April 12, 2024 / subject to changes www.donaufestival.at
donaufestival 2024 April 19–21 and 26–28, 2024 | Krems an der Donau Music, performance, art, film, and discourse. Under the guidance of artistic director Thomas Edlinger since 2017, donaufestival presents audacious aesthetics and vibes in current contemporary art. This year, a programme of around 55 events will take place on two spring weekends (Friday to Sunday) at various locations in Krems.
Community of Aliens They say only strangers understand the world. Who are these sympathetic strangers and what might they look like? Perhaps like the erratic being in Joshua Serafin’s performance VOID, which is inspired by Filipino deities? Or the “alien collectives” that Sylvia Eckermann and Gerald Nestler conjure in their mixed-media project devoted to cosmic diversity? The 2024 festival revolves around an “impossible” question: How can a community emerge that is founded on the experience of strangeness and (self-)estrangement and a disrupted relationship with nature? How can transformative aesthetic strategies debunk tyrannical forms of “othering” such as racism and sexism? donaufestival 2024 is in search of transitory figures to mediate between toxic pasts and unforeseen futures. A cast might be found in the futuristic folk music of the exile Iranian-Chilean trio HUUUM, in the new Warholesque work I Want To Be A Machine by singer Jenny Hval, in the Afrofuturistic telepathic speculations of Dopplereffekt, or in the camp cowboys busy welding on stage in the performance Impact Driver by Eve Stainton (live music: Leisha Thomas and Mica Levi). You might feel pleasantly alien in your own head, in your own body, in the midst of the demolition-ball drone of Evian Christ, when faced with the vigorous rap of Aunty Rayzor or the techno animism of Meuko! Meuko!, immersed in the unruly noise of the new Austrian supergroup EAERES or in the purist darkness of Autechre’s soundscapes. The alien music of the gospel, soul, and R’n’B atomizer Dawuna or the Black techno act Speaker Music (DeForrest Brown, Jr.), the radically queer visual inventions of Johanna Bruckner, or the parallels between robot uprisings and the historical riots in 1981 South London uncovered in Kibwe Tavares’s video point in the right direction, too. Community of Aliens summons a “community of the unchosen” (Sabine Hark), planetary alliances that can counter the renaissance of imperial violence and new political hostilities. It is also about what such future-oriented affiliations want to prevent: Candice Breitz satirises the claim of racism against whites in her video installation Whiteface at Kunsthalle Krems, reciting the discourse on “whiteness” like a ventriloquist’s dummy. The artist’s zombiesque eyes plunge the fictions that legitimise and perpetuate white supremacy into the genre of horror. Christian Guerematchi’s spectral figure named Blaq Tito, for instance, reminds us of the politics of the non-aligned states. His video installation echoes the relationship between former Yugoslavia and Ghana, illustrating what Frédéric Neyrat calls the “communism of the strange.”
NÖ Festival und Kino GmbH, Minoritenplatz 5, 3500 Krems an der Donau