Whether progressive contemporary art or future-oriented research: Sankt Pölten, the booming provincial capital of Lower Austria, is increasingly developing into an impressively dynamic hotspot of creative work with far-reaching impact and international appeal. It is therefore perfectly understandable that one of the largest and most exciting Austrian festivals, Tangente St. Pölten, will celebrate its premiere here in 2024 - a festival whose interdisciplinary, socially inclusive and ecologically oriented program is made up of visual arts, theater and performances, music, literature as well as science and discourse formats and brings influential protagonists of the scene to the city on the Traisen. The groundbreaking aspect of many events: The topics of ecology, remembrance and democracy, which are essential for the present and relevant worldwide, are also developed from the city's events and history. Some of the highlights of the extensive program calendar are highlighted below.
Christian Philipp Müller, A bath for Florian, sculptural intervention © eSeL
The sculptural intervention A Bath for Florian by renowned Swiss conceptual artist Christian Philipp Müller has been on display on the newly designed Cathedral Square in St. Pölten since fall 2023. On the site where the governor's palace was located in the Roman city of Aelium Cetium in the 3rd century AD, Müller is making the invisible, the past, what was once there, present again in a sensual way until May 2024; this multi-layered performative sculpture on historical ground will then be followed by a project by Mexican artist Mariana Castillo Deball.
Another incredibly fascinating highlight of Tangente St. Pölten 2024 is the "art trail" developed by Joanna Warsza (Tangente curator for visual arts) with 30 artistic positions along the waters of St. Pölten. "The projects," explains Warsza, "consist partly of new commissions and partly of existing works that have been adapted to the new contexts: from drawings made by the water, to instruments floating in the river, to audio pieces about what lies beneath the surface of the water." A unique "exhibition in collaboration with the river" can be experienced, which can be explored on a tour by bike, on foot and, according to Warsza, perhaps even by kayak, but also offers interesting discoveries to those who happen to be passing by.
Joanna Warsza, curator for visual arts, Tangente St. Pölten - Festival for Contemporary Culture © Jürgen Völkl
The programme at the Festspielhaus Sankt Pölten also includes an opera that is as explosive as it is evocative: Milo Rau, the internationally acclaimed Swiss theatre-maker and new artistic director of the Vienna Festival, is developing a choral and elegiac work in the opera Justice about an environmental disaster in the Congo and the fate of a village in times of globalization - the theater can be seen here as a political place where global discourses are collectively negotiated. The voices of ghosts and victims, the guilty and the supposedly guilty mingle with the myths of the region, which is not only rich in natural resources. Congolese author Fiston Mwanza Mujila, who lives in Graz, has been recruited as co-librettist, while the music is by Catalan composer Hèctor Parra. A top-class ensemble can also be experienced on stage, and the formidable conductor Titus Engel is at the podium of the Niederösterreichische Tonkünstler.
Tonkünstler Orchestra, Festspielhaus St. Pölten © Werner Kmetitsch
The extraordinary production Shared Landscapes, co-produced by Tangente St. Pölten, the Berliner Festspiele and the Festival d'Avignon, among others, and realized by the Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne and Rimini Apparat, in turn takes seven contemporary pieces to the outskirts of Sankt Pölten, where, according to the announcement, "an entire day is spent among trees, meadows, human and non-human inhabitants. In the open air, a new kind of community is created at the transition between city and countryside." The intensive, highly recommended performance, conceived and curated by Caroline Barneaud and Stefan Kaegi (Rimini Protokoll), includes a walk lasting several hours with artistic interventions, performances, audio tours, music scores, choreographies and media art.
Other highlights of the Tangente St. Pölten 2024 are also Katalog der Vögel with the French star pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard and the wonderful actress Birgit Minichmayr, who will be exploring Olivier Messiaen's 13-part cycle Catalogue d'oiseaux, which delves deep into the world of birdsong; the world premiere of the Austrian-Italian-Dutch music theater production Alfa Romeo and the electric Giulietta, in which the internationally renowned collective Wunderbaum creates a forward-looking narrative about the former vision of a beautiful, new (car) world that is increasingly losing its beauty and novelty today; the performance of Marta Górnicka's Mothers. A Song for Wartime, a gripping musical theater production at the Landestheater that revolves around violent war rituals and focuses on Ukrainian, Polish and Belarusian mothers and their children; Alien Disko with indie rock luminaries The Notwist and their program developed exclusively for the Tangente and the Festspielhaus; the brilliant dance theater piece New Work by Crystal Pite and Jonathon Young, in which the human need for belonging is explored in a captivatingly emotional way; and the far-sighted dance evening "blue nile to the galaxy around olodumare" by Jeremy Nedd and the group Impilo Mapantsula, who trace the intricate experiences of the African diaspora and know how to fuse spiritual, cosmic jazz and Afrofuturism as a gesture of liberation in an incomparable way.
April 30 to October 6, 2024
www.tangente-st-poelten.at
