Revisiting TransAct from today’s perspective
Panel discussion with Nika Autor, Yoshinori Niwa, and Lisl Ponger
Moderation: Simon Nagy
17:30 h Welcoming words in the exhibition (Exhibit Gallery, 1st floor)
18 h Panel discussion in the university library (Room M7, Mezzanin)
In 2000, as a protest against the right-wing FPÖ led by Jörg Haider entering government with the ÖVP in Austria, Cathrin Pichler and museum in progress launched the initiative TransAct: they invited more than 100 artists, intellectuals and academics to write statements and submit artistic interventions for weekly features in the newspaper Der Standard. For the publication and exhibition Das Cathrin Pichler Archiv von RPU-Artaud-001 bis DAV-Plakate-029, Nika Autor actualised this project by collecting statements from people currently affected by European and Austrian asylum and border policies.
The panel discussion takes Autor’s work as an opportunity to talk about TransAct from a contemporary perspective: Which forms of political intervention and criticism can be found in current artistic practices? And what developments and parallels can be drawn between the political situation at the beginning of the 2000s and today? The discussion will be moderated by Simon Nagy and framed by individual artistic contributions from TransAct as well as materials from the Cathrin Pichler Archive. The discussion guests, next to Nika Autor, are the artist and filmmaker Lisl Ponger, who developed a contribution for TransAct together with Tim Sharp, and the performance artist Yoshinori Niwa, whose poster project for this year's steirischer herbst provided a sensational satire of the FPÖ’s election campaign.