National Camp – Variations on Nationalism

Contemporary Interpretations of Nationalism at steirischer herbst ‘24 Exhibition Horror Patriae

The 2024 edition of steirischer herbst, Graz’s long-established but ever-renewing arts festival, condenses the main phenomena that have shaped the past decades and, especially, the past year’s political reality. The festival and its accompanying thematic exhibition take a fresh look at the ever-present problem of nationalism. The title, Horror Patriae, is an inventive blend of the phrases horror vacui (fear of emptiness) and amor patriae (love of one’s homeland). The programme explores the emotional void that growing nationalist ideology and politics of exclusion aim to fill. Compellingly, the festival combines the genre of horror with the contradictory feelings that arise in many people when they hear the words ‘homeland’ and ‘nation’. Horror Patriae raises a number of alarming questions: Is there anything more horrifying than violence based on national interest? How much deeper can social divisions get? Will the political permacrisis ever end?^[1]

The relevance of the topic is further demonstrated by the fact that the UN has referred to 2024 as a “mega-election year”: over a hundred elections have been held in nation states around the world, including European parliamentary elections, the US presidential election and the Austrian parliamentary election.^[2]

The exhibition at the Neue Galerie Graz goes beyond the issue of nationalism to critique national museums as one of the institutions that were called into being by the consolidation of nation states in the 19th century. To quote the curators of the exhibition: “National museums are haunted houses. Established by empires and states that have long since ceased to exist, they served to construct and confirm national myths.”^[3]

The issue of national museums is not only apparent on a conceptual level, as in the rooms of the Neue Galerie, contemporary artworks are in dialogue with artefacts borrowed from various national, historical and ethnographic collections. This dialogical curatorial principle can be tracked throughout all the thematic rooms. Each room takes a particular angle on the critique of nationalism, with playful section names such as “The Department of Mild Megalomania” or “The Chamber of Improbable Patriots“.

Before entering the exhibition space, above the staircase, we are confronted with Thomas Hörl‘s installation Ahnengalerie (Ancestral Gallery), which can be interpreted as the opening work of Horror Patriae and a kind of visual motto. The ten-metre-long photographic installation is based on an ambivalent figure from Alpine folklore, the Perchta. According to Alpine pagan beliefs, (Frau) Perchta comes in the form of a beautiful snow-white woman or a frightening witch in the middle of winter to reward well-behaved children and stuff the bellies of the naughty ones with straw. For Hörl, the figure of Frau Perchta – and the androgynous Perchten creatures that accompany her – blends the creepiness of children’s horror stories with a fluid gender expression that is defiant of the clergy. It is important to note that during the Third Reich, certain Nazi folklore researchers played a major role in reviving and appropriating similar masquerading traditions, seeking to reinforce German identity through the preservation of traditional customs.

The first room of the Neue Galerie explores the building blocks of Austria’s identity construction – not sparing self-irony. In one of the room’s most exciting pairings, Karl Haiding‘s ethnographic photographs and a lesser-known action by VALIE EXPORT enter into dialogue. Karl Haiding was a notorious figure in Austrian nationalist folklore research. As a member of the German National Socialist Party, he taught folk dancing to the Hitler Youth and devoted his life to researching Aryan folklore and preparing for Germanisation. During his research, he also made photographic documentation, of which a series, featuring images depicting bullfighting was included in the exhibition. Haiding’s black and white photographs are similar in visuality and ritual content to the documentation of VALIE EXPORT’s 1973 Homometer action. In the performance, EXPORT’s ankles are tied to two huge loaves of bread, as she climbs out onto a sandy beach and then walks back into the water, suggesting a kind of suicide. In the performance, the bread, a symbol of life and motherhood (motherland), becomes a burdensome and oppressive object.

Also in the first room are two sculptures by Michéle Pagel. Pagel’s sculptures in plaster and steel, entitled White Trash Bag, explore the construction of ‘white identity’. The anthropomorphic, trash bag-shaped bodies of the sculptures are bound by lederhosen (Bavarian leather trousers) and dirndl (a corset-like Austrian or Bavarian women’s garment) made of rusted steel plate as if trying to conceal something with a piece rarely worn, outgrown folk clothing.

Ukrainian artist Alina Kleytman also explores the nuances of “whiteness” through satire. The video work A Place to See Before You Die parodies travel agency promotional videos, starring a fictional character, Dirty White Victim and Fool, played by Kleytman, who presents the bombed-out city of Kharkiv and its newly built cemeteries as an attractive tourist destination. The character’s name (Dirty White) and its monster-like figure suggest the notion of ‘dirty whiteness’, which refers to the peripheral position of Eastern European people in contrast to the supposed privileges of ‘universal whiteness.^[4]

The works in the exhibition show a wide variety of humour, some subtle in their allusions, others downright scathing. For example, works by Jakub Jansa and Madison Bycroft are predominantly based on world-building through role-playing and camp aesthetics heightened to the point of ridicule. The concept of camp is difficult to grasp, its essence lying mostly in its deliberate exaggerations. Camp appropriates ‘bad taste’ and uses it in new ways as a means of artistic creation. 

Jakub Jansa’s video installation Pumpkinville consists of TV sculptures and a fifteen-minute narrative video. Jansa’s fictional world is made up of human-vegetable hybrids whose lives are not so different from our own. Like the rest of us, they escape from the mundane into reality TV shows, struggle with anxiety, and look to the socio-economic system for the root of all their problems. The film’s protagonist, Celeriac – a burnt-out celery bulb who most resembles a film noir detective character – sets out to expose the lies of the most popular vegetable reality show, Pumpkinville, and save Pumpkin, who has been distracting the wider vegetable community from real problems since her birth as a reality TV show star.

Madison Bycroft creates a twisted, queer version of Roman antiquity, focusing on political intrigue and divination. The central figure in Bycroft’s video work, rich in colour, texture and camp elements, is Felix, a young augur whose initiation is celebrated with a sumptuous feast organised by the College of Oracles. Bycroft plays with the constructed nature of rituals, customs and myths. Their work celebrates attitudes such as uncertainty, deception and ambiguity; in contrast to forms of political ideology that emphasise authenticity, rigid traditions and fixed gender roles.

In examining nationalism, it is inevitable to thematise the fabrication of enemy conceptions and xenophobia. In the thematic section, Ward of Wild Fantasies, I will highlight the digital collage by the AES+F group and the video performance by Robert Gabris. The Moscow-based AES+F group made its debut between 1996 and 2003 with the ongoing group of works entitled Islamic Project, a concept in which typical buildings and landmarks of Western societies were juxtaposed with stereotypical representations of non-European cultures: camels marched in front of the Budapest parliament, the Cologne cathedral was transformed into a mosque, and the American Statue of Liberty wore a burqa. During the Steirischer Herbst ’97, AES+F also set up a fictitious travel agency as an addition to the Islamic Project, and created a future vision of the Graz Clock Tower under Islamic rule in 2006, which was re-exhibited in 2024.

In the video performance, Insectology in My Body, Robert Gabris transforms their own body into various insects through strange costumes and movements. For Gabris, the transformation into a Kafkaesque insect embodies the dehumanizing gaze of broader society. As a queer and Romani artist, they explore the problematic past of European ethnographic research, which, for many years, has viewed non-European people and communities in a dehumanizing way. Non-European bodies have served merely as research material, which could even be subjected to study through autopsies.

Perhaps the most poignant work in the exhibition is Assaf Gruber’s short film Miraculous Accident. The film adapts the life of Moroccan director Abdelkader Lagtaâ into a semi-fictional story set across multiple timelines. In 1968, a cultural policy programme invited North African students to study at film academies in the Soviet bloc. This is how Nadir, a Moroccan student, and Edyta, a Polish-Jewish professor in her 40s, meet and fall in love at the Film Academy in Łódź. Their relationship ends with the suppression of the 1968 student riots. In 2024, the elderly Nadir–played by Abdelkader Lagtaâ–returns to the Polish Film Academy as a successful director to make his last film about Edyta and the events of 1968.

Horror Patriae alludes to Benedict Anderson’s seminal book Imagined Communities^[5] in many ways. The festival, echoing Anderson, is not afraid to explore the roots of ingrained ideas, to subvert clichés and to point out the absurdity of exaggerated nationalisms. Alongside horror and humour, camp^[6] -in the Susan Sontagian sense- can be seen in many elements of the exhibition. If we think about it, we can discover quite eerie similarities between the aesthetics of camp and the visual tools of nationalism: magnified visuals, mass processions, costumes evoking the past, and endless rehashing of myths. Perhaps it is not too far-fetched to coin the term ‘national camp’ along these overlapping lines, in the same way the term ‘Horror Patriae’ was created. The Eurovision Song Contest is national camp,  as are historical re-enactments, but conservative heritage politics is also a form of national camp. A more conscious, self-reflective and thoughtful form of national camp permeates the whole of steirischer herbst ’24.

Horror Patriae (curators: Ekaterina Degot, David Riff, Gábor Thury and Pieternel Vermoorte; assistant curator: Beatrice Forchini and Tobias Ihl.), Neue Galerie Graz, Graz, 20. 09. 2024 – 16. 02. 2026

Cover image: The entrance to the Horror Patriae exhibition. steirischer herbst ’24, Neue Galerie Graz. Photo: steirischer herbst / kunst-dokumentation.com

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[1] Permacrisis: a succession of crises. The word of the year in 2022 according to the Collins English Dictionary.

[2] ‘Mega election’ 2024 could be a landmark for democracy: UN rights chief, news.un.org 2024. 03. 05.

[3] „National museums are haunted houses. Established by empires and states that have long since ceased to exist, they served to construct and confirm national myths.” Quote from the concept of the exhibition, translated by the author.

[4] see also: Böröcz, J. (2021). “Eurowhite” Conceit, “Dirty White” Ressentment: “Race” in Europe. Sociological Forum, 36(4), 1116–1134. https://doi.org/10.1111/socf.12752

[5] Anderson, Benedict R. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed. London: Verso, 2016.

[6] Sontag, Susan. Notes on ‘Camp’. Penguin Books, 2018.