BAD&BOUJEE celebrate black wom*n coming from different backgrounds. The collective was founded by the Vienna born and raised Elisabeth Mtasa & Enyonam Tetteh-Klu, who along with their resident djs Tonica Hunter & Tmnit Ghide and resident MC and vocalist Tanya Moyo put on parties for all peoples regardless of skin colour, sexuality or gender.

The work UNTITLED (WE DON´T REMEMBER) by Felix Gonzalez-Torres is closely related to concepts developed by artists such as Steve McQueen. Gonzalez-Torres’s work – which in the exhibition space takes on the form of a precisely placed stack of paper – is simultaneously installation, sculpture, and print. It is defined as a work of art whether or not it physically exists and instigates a dialogue with visitors. Both formally (as sculpture, the artwork dissolves into its individual sheets) and conceptually (the materials used to manifest the work cease to be a work of art as soon as the exhibition is over), this work achieves an ultimate volatility that allows the printed and elicited information itself to become real.
The quote ‘we don’t remember’ raises questions that reach beyond mere history to address both the collective will and individual responsibility. For Gonzalez-Torres, the line between public and private has always been fragile: ‘I don’t think my work is political. I think it’s about the stuff that won’t let me sleep at night.’ ¹

1 Susan Tallmann, “The Ethos of the Edition: The Stacks of Felix Gonzalez-Torres”, in Julie Ault (Ed.), Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Göttingen: Steidl 2016, p. 127. Originally published in Arts Magazine
66, no. 1 (September 1991), S./pp. 13-14.

Nada Prlja makes work that challenges the critical discourse surrounding issues of politics, nationalism, the transitional experiences of ex-socialist countries (and their citizens), human rights, and migration. By adopting a specific site’s historical and political context or by implementing a certain set of social conditions, her work often varies in the choice of media deemed most appropriate, from installation to film, performance to public interventions. This versatility is demonstrated in a number of new and recreated works for Innsbruck International.
HOW CAN THEY BE SO SURE OF THEMSELVES? is an arrangement of re-purposed wooden chairs that have been etched and engraved with fragments of text. The quotes are from the German writer Carolin Emcke’s book-length essay ‘Against Hate’, which counters the partisanship of extreme political ideologies with a call for fluidity, pluralism, and nuance. The integration of selected phrases upon the chairs, and their staging within the Welcome-Center, infers a pedagogical mission, an instructive immersion in a new system of learning.
STOP THE WAR AGAINST IMMIGRANTS presents an assortment of broken and battered political banners. Advocating support for the rights of migrants and minorities, the installation evokes the aftermath of a demonstration, while remaining ambiguous towards its efficacy. Their disarray implies a sense of violence and conflict, as if cast aside in the face of armed resistance.
These concerns are echoed in another work by Prlja; AUSTRIA(N). This intervention in Innsbruck’s public takes the form of multiple hand-painted T-shirts, bearing the title in the native  languages of immigrant communities. Like Prlja’s other works, they challenge fixed notions of national identity, proposing an(other) definition of what it means to be Austrian while, at the same time, bracketing that identity as something separate or segregated. Throughout the biennial, the shirts will be seen on Innsbruck’s buildings – Keep your eyes open!

Summer 2016: In the Saxon village of Arnsdorf near Dresden (East Germany) a Kurdish-Iraqi refugee enters a discount supermarket to report a problem with his recently acquired prepaid SIM card. An argument between the cashier and the man escalates when four men attack the refugee, drag him out of the shop, and tie him to a nearby tree. The police arrive twenty-five minutes later. The four men walk home, unidentified by the police, while the refugee is questioned at the station. Ten days later a YouTube video goes viral documenting the incident inside the supermarket. An investigation leads to a trial with the four men charged with false imprisonment—and Schabas Saleh Al-Aziz accused of robbery and threatening behaviour. The case is dismissed in less than four hours on the grounds that it is not in the public interest and the key witness cannot testify anymore. Schabas Saleh Al-Aziz’s corpse was found a week before the trial. Frozen to death in a forest.
AGAIN re-enacts the incident and investigates Schabas Saleh Al-Aziz’s mix of feelings generated by his escape from Iraq, the subsequent refugee aid, medical care, and legal disputes. Present during the film’s live production, ten citizens observe the performance and watch archive material on the case. Based on their own migrant experience, they comment on what they have seen – evincing intense emotional reactions. The re-enactment is performed by nonprofessional performers together with German actors Dennenesch Zoudé and Mark Waschke.

Steve McQueen is an internationally acclaimed artist and filmmaker who, over the last twenty years, has authored some of the most seminal works of the moving image and sculpture. His work hovers between the specific and the universal, the literal and the abstract, evading definition and multiplying experiential and interpretive possibilities. Certain works stem from McQueen’s unflinching observation of the self, others draw from a potent, at times bleak, political consciousness, which addresses specific historical moments.
END CREDITS takes as its inspiration the life of African-American singer, actor and activist Paul Robeson (1898-1976). McQueen envisioned the structure of the piece as one related to the conclusion of every feature film: the rolling credits. Here however, the backstory becomes the narrative itself.
Beginning in the 1920s Robeson pursued his lifelong artistic and intellectual activities: performing in concerts, plays and films. By the 1930s he was traveling extensively, writing and speaking internationally on social and political issues and to overwhelming acclaim. As World War II began in Europe, Robeson returned from London to the U.S. and emerged as a symbol of the fight against fascism abroad and racism at home. He was a national hero hailed by both black and white Americans. A powerful voice for social justice, he was blacklisted in the 1950s for his activism, and his career as a performer was all but destroyed. FBI documents obtained by McQueen through the Freedom of Information Act reveal that United States surveillance agencies had begun investigating Robeson as early as 1941. This scrutiny continued throughout the rest of his life, with crippling effects. In poor health, he spent his final decade in seclusion in New York and Philadelphia.
McQueen’s work is a radical look at Robeson’s extraordinary story. The artist has included every document – thousands and thousands of pages – in Robeson’s recently declassified, although still heavily redacted, FBI files. The work is an exercise in duration: over six hours of ‘footage’ combined with a spoken-word soundtrack. The discrepancy between the visual and audio components  reates a predictable but asymmetrical loop. END CREDITS was first shown in 2012 and continues to evolve. As more documents are declassified each year, Innsbruck International has recently co-produced its latest sequence.

Cecilia Stenbom examines individual methods and coping mechanisms used to navigate safely and comfortably through everyday life. Reinterpreting scenarios within entertainment, mass media, retail, and domestic life, she explores human response to a consumer driven and information rich culture.
SYSTEM is a film about anxieties, irrational behaviour and the quest for control in a non-domestic space. Set entirely inside a shopping centre, it follows the interactions between two sisters; one anxious about her personal safety, the other concerned with the invisible threat of infection. The sterile atmosphere quickly becomes menacing, as the women’s personal safety systems begin to fail.
RULES OF ENGAGEMENT explores the unwritten rules of social interaction that control our behaviour. The film shows three scenarios in which a person fails to conform, either through choice or by misunderstanding. The first vignette explores the excruciating return to an outgrown family unit during a birthday celebration. The second story, based on a casual get-together for people interested in BDSM role-play, investigates the careful negotiation necessary to integrate with a new social context. The final vignette is set in a professional context, where the outsider is trying, and failing, to blend in with ultra-conservative colleagues.

14:00 music:
Ulrike Haage
A Funeral March for the First Cosmonaut
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On April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin with the spaceship Vostok 1 orbited the earth in 108 minutes, writing space history. Barely seven years later, the space pioneer died in the crash of his MiG near Moscow. The cause of the accident is still not understood.
From the beginning, the Lebanese-American poet, philosopher and painter Etel Adnan was interested in philosophical, artistic and mythical aspects of the space programs of the great powers. The cosmonaut Gagarin – ‘the great child in the great machine’ – particularly impressed her. In 1968, after his death, she wrote the eleven-part poem A FUNERAL MARCH FOR THE FIRST COSMONAUT – a metaphor on flights of fancy and crashes of mankind. Fifty years after its release, Etel Adnan entrusted the typewritten version to composer and pianist Ulrike Haage. As she declared, the Funeral March calls for composition, evokes music, sounds, acoustics.
Ulrike Haage composed an experimental requiem and at the same time a radio-poem in which text and sound, composition and improvisation, singing and voices, languages and noises are congenially interlinked. One may hear this piece like a concert performance, one may enter it like a space-time-sound installation, guided by the voice of Etel Adnan herself. Her poetry opens up a
questioning of our state of being. ‘Today we are at the beginning of a new upheaval. No easy change. We are in the process of becoming a new species. We already are.’ (Ulrike Haage)

One characteristic feature of historiography is that it continually overrules itself: In line with views of the respective present, the past repeatedly appears in a new light.¹ When Isaac Chong Wai moved from Hong Kong to Germany in 2013, the omnipresence of a history that was not his own overwhelmed him.² Chong’s work, which revolves around issues such as imprisonment, borders, victimization, and oppression, painfully alludes to our ‘narrow acts of remembrance’³, but is at the same time reconciliatory and optimistic: ‘History is the investigation of the past with its power to affirm and define evolution and progress of human life.’⁴
In November 2015, the artist was injured in Berlin in a hate crime in Berlin when he was assaulted with a glass bottle. As evidence of his injury, he took his Self-Portrait. Later, a friend warned him: ‘the world is not your friend’. Rejecting this determined pessimism, Chong turned the negation into an open question.⁵
For his Project PRISON the artist built a life-size boat from the wire fence of a former Weimar prison. He then carried the unseaworthy boat across the city and back to the prison. In using a material that initially held prisoners captive, he created an object suggesting the fragile possibility of escape. In the paintings of the series LINES, he again adopts the wire fence as a motif. On closer inspection, the lines hardly touch each other. The concept of the border remains a fragile one.

1 See: Lotte Laub, ‘Isaac Chong Wai. What is the future in the past? And what is the past in the future?’ Introduction by Lotte Laub, in: Isaac Chong Wai: What is the future in the past? And what
is the past in the future? Zilberman, Berlin, p.26.
2 See: Caroline Ha Thuc, ‘Versöhnung mit einer lebendigen Vergangenheit über nationale Grenzen hinweg/Reconciling a living past across national frontiers’, in: ibid., p.80.
3 Ibid.
4 Isaac Chong Wai, WHAT IS THE FUTURE IN THE PAST? AND WHAT IS THE PAST IN THE FUTURE? Creating Time in Public Space through Performance, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar,
Masterarbeit/Master’s thesis, 2016, p.70.
5 See: Is the World Your Friend? Isaac Chong Wai 29.1.2019 – 9.3.2019, Press release 26.01.2019, Blindspot Gallery

‘Identity is like a tree, one day it is happy, one day it loses its leaves, but there is continuity.’¹
Artist Etel Adnan was born in Beirut in 1925 and grew up surrounded by numerous cultures and languages. Since the 1950s she has been working as a writer, philosopher, poet, and painter. In her work she explores questions of language, memory, history, landscape, abstraction, and colour.
Her abstract paintings she understands as poetic writing. She applies vibrating colours in clearly contoured surfaces with a spatula. Many of her recent works – the artist calls them ‘inner landscapes’ – are influenced by memories of Mount Tamalpaïs near San Francisco, where she lived for several decades.
Etel Adnan is considered one of the most important authors in the Arab world. She has published numerous volumes of poetry, a novel, plays, and essays. Innsbruck International will be featuring her radio-poems A Funeral March for the First Cosmonaut (at Kreuzgang Servitenkloster) and Night (Musikpavillon, Hofgarten) created in collaboration with Ulrike Haage.
1 Interview with Vera Kern, 12.07.2012, Qantara.de: en.qantara.de/node/2576

The video piece REHEARSAL OF THE FUTURES: POLICE TRAINING EXERCISES is a continuation of the artist’s investigation into imagined futures and how, through certain movements and postures, past ideology can be interpreted and improved upon by future generations. As a point of departure for this work, Isaac Chong Wai takes on the history of protests through their repetitive expressions and actions.
His research into police training exercises around the world also questions the development of these actions and their intended use: Are they meant as a first line of defence, or a last resort? Chong and a group of performers enact choreographed sets of movements based on past alterations at protest sites and training exercises taught at police academies, but at greatly reduced speeds. When drastically slowed down, these acts are transformed into something new. Aggressive posturing and the threatening collision of bodies become poetic, gentle, healing, and even comforting caresses. At the same time, these decelerated actions visualize the slow violence inflicted upon individuals by the collective power structures. Can beauty be found in confrontation? And if so, can such beauty lead to reconciliation? (Blindspot Gallery)

‘We live by day and I feel that we’ve lost the mystery of the night. The night poses questions. It’s beautiful. It’s not a void, it’s not empty. If you look you can see, even in the darkest night. You see differently, you think, you feel …’
Etel Adnan has been fascinated by the night for her entire life. The dark night over the sea and the mountains of Lebanon and the Californian hills, and the many stars shining in this darkness. The moon, which for her is female. The bright night over the cities, neon, lights, a world between, a neither-nor. The loneliness of the night. Its hustle and bustle, which settles down by morning.
Etel Adnan has expressed her love for the night in a book of poetry; a homage from a night being, as she describes herself, to the night as the realm of dreams – the ‘greatest expansions of our mind’.
The radio poem Night installed at the Musikpavillon Hofgarten was created from these observations, comments, short circuits and concepts, in collaboration with the composer and musician Ulrike Haage. (Klosterruine Berlin)

Artist and filmmaker Guillermo Tellechea has revived the Cinématon project, an archive of one-shot film portraits in Super 8 format developed by Gérard Courant in the late 1970s. An individual is filmed in a single take lasting 200 seconds (the length of a Super 8mm magazine) and is given the opportunity to reveal ‘essential truths of their personality’ (Courant: 1989).
Initiated at the first biennial in 2013 and continuing since, 15 Tyrolean artists have so far been invited to give insight into their ‘true self’: Paul Albert Leitner, Dieter Henke & Marta Schreieck, Annja Krautgasser, Martin Philadelphy, Daniel Pöhacker, Eva Schlegel, Esther Stocker, Peter Quehenberger (2013); Lissie Rettenwander, Klaus Händl and Heidrun Sandbichler (2016); as well as Jürgen Bauer, Romana Fiechtner and Peter Blaas (2018).
This year, the archive of Tyrolean artists will once more be expanded to include three additional Cinématons: visual artist Martin Gostner, musician and composer Thomas Larcher as well as actress Teresa Waas have portrayed themselves.

Basir Mahmood works with video, film and photography to explore embedded social and historical terrains of the ordinary. His practice weaves threads of thought into poetic sequences and forms of narrative and, in his film MONUMENT OF ARRIVAL AND RETURN, demonstrates this approach through the establishment of particular roles carried out by the film’s protagonists. A group of men are clad in the red shirted uniforms of Kullis (often derogatorily referred to as Coolies), railway porters under the British colonial rule of the Indian subcontinent. As one group enters a barren chamber, another leaves, under the apparent direction of an unseen instigator. Mahmood’s camera lingers unhurriedly on certain details: a trembling flower, hands clutching a parcel, a man bearing a pair of slip-on shoes, beads of sweat on skin. They drink water, offer their objects to each other, and wait. This languorous scene only comes to an end when they depart and, as the film begins again, another group arrives.
Mahmood worked with the Kullis of Lahore railway station, familiar figures from his upbringing in the city, in making MONUMENT OF ARRIVAL AND RETURN. He gave them instructions but remained otherwise absent, peripheral to the unfolding direction of events. As in other works by the artist, Mahmood often sets out parameters and structures but lets his collaborators, actors, or crew members, dictate the terms of their engagement. The work is thus not wholly his own but fulfilled as a gesture of openness, allowing individual agency and indeterminacy to stage a new narrative.

In LEMONISM x ACTIONISM Akemi Takeya confronts Actionism with her idea of “Lemonism”: She sets up a battle between the two concepts, adapts and re-enacts the strategies of Actionism. In Takeya’s cosmic and artistic world “Lemonism” focuses on the body as material of “the I” including 72 items. It is a trial of finding a new perspective to present the body, which aims to reconstruct the way of the definition of the body. The presentation of this action through the 72 items re-identifies the body in a transfiguration – a multiple integration through action. The lemon becomes a metaphor and a vessel for transforming each of the 72 items, a means of imprinting or personifying nature itself. Flesh acts as flesh, juice for blood, cut for cut.

LEMONISM x ACTIONISM is inspired by the concept of the Mandala, which in Hinduism and Buddhism signifies the whole universe. Akemi Takeya picks up references to ritual practices and navigates the spectator through the 72 tokens of her cosmic world between Asian and European culture.

Performers: Saori Hala and Nobutaka Shomura

The images of the Pietà in Christian iconography usually depict Mary cradling the dead body of Jesus. In Chong’s duo piece pietas, a woman and a man are holding each other in turn according to the gestures of iconic biblical images – from Michelangelo’s Pietà to Käthe Kollwitz’s Mother with her Dead Son –, except that the person who is held keeps his or her eyes open and cries in silence: This way, the artist reverses the act of lamentation and offers a powerful reflection about individual and collective compassion vis-a-vis time and history.

Radio Diwanistan combine musical influences from Eastern Europe, the Middle East and the Balkans to create a fresh new sound that changes smoothly between oriental party mood and Eastern European blues, improvisation, original compositions, regional traditional genres and the repertoire of famous interpreters. A cosmopolitan mixture emerged from the duo Julia Rhomberg & Hassan Ibrahim Berzencî, who sing in dialogue but in different languages, which reflects the background of the musicians and with which the ensemble is already filling large concert halls.

INNSBRUCK INTERNATIONAL Special Recognition Award Ceremony

21:00 BAD&BOUJEE DJ-Set at the Welcome-Center (Glaskubus, Rennweg 4)

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INNSBRUCK INTERNATIONAL SPECIAL RECOGNITION AWARD 2020
The presentation of this year’s Innsbruck International Special Recognition Award at the venue Tourismus Information Innsbruck marked the opening of INNSBRUCK INTERNATIONAL 2020. Innsbruck International has set itself the task of honouring artists with a connection to Tyrol in order to support them in their further development and profiling in an international context. In 2020, the award was donated once more by Swarovski Kristallwelten.
Previous award winners are Heidrun Sandbichler (2016) and Addie Wagenknecht (2018). This recognition involves a possibility for showing or exhibiting the artist’s work and the production of new works. This year, the award was granted to musician and poet Julia Rhomberg.