Boris Mikhailov

Posters by artists have always been one of the strong points of steirischer herbst’s festival program. In the 1970s, some of them even made headlines and created a local scandal. Without necessarily aiming at one but carrying on the tradition strongly connected to Graz and its people, the festival this year wants to disrupt the public space, nowadays saturated with glossy images of all kinds, with new artist’s works, sometimes enigmatic but always memorable. Artists were asked to react to the slogan The Way Out, but not necessarily to illustrate or refer to it directly. What we see are not always posters in the strict sense, but fragments of the artists’ rich imagination, fluctuating freely between scenes of pure fantasy, split-second life impressions, and direct political statements.


Bio
Boris Mikhailov (1938, Kharkiv, Ukraine) is a photographer and artist famous for his gritty documentary and staged pictures portraying the dissolution of socialism in the former Soviet Union. Honing in on those at the margins of society, his work is often performatively erotic while braving an all-pervasive atmosphere of mortality. He lives in Berlin.

9.9.–10.10.

City of Graz and Visitor and Press Center

The posters are also available for sale in the Visitor and Press Center, individually and as silkscreens in numbered editions. They can also be ordered online.

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Commissioned and produced by steirischer herbst ʼ21