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Art in Public Space > Our programme > Calendar > Bringing History into Motion – or Do We Still Need Monuments?
Image Credits
Date
10.10.2026
Time
4pm
Presented by
Institute for Art in Public Space Styria
Meeting point
Griesgasse 40, 8020 Graz
With
zweintopf, Urte Evert, Rudolf Herz, Nicole Six and Paul Petritsch
Costs
free
External registration
No registration required, limited seating
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Monuments are not history books. Yet monuments – and the absence of sites of remembrance – reveal what a society considers essential. How sites of remembrance should appropriately commemorate violence and atrocities is continually renegotiated: up until the 1980s, the culture of remembrance was fiercely contested. Since then, artistic strategies have emerged that range from reflection and contextualisation to the counter-monument. Rather than prescribing how we should remember, they keep wounds open and stimulate public debate.
Join us for an afternoon on artistic strategies with zweintopf, Rudolf Herz, Nicole Six and Paul Petritsch, and Urte Evert.
Moderator: Gabriele Mackert
Further information
Language: German
Urte Evert is a military historian and folklorist. Following positions at the German Historical Museum and the Military History Museum at Berlin-Gatow Airfield, she has been Director of the historical museums at Spandau Citadel, Berlin, since 2017. Dealing with unwanted and toppled monuments, as well as “toxic” art in public spaces, has become a key focus of her.
Rudolf Herz is an honorary professor at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts. His artistic projects often revolve around iconoclasm and the politics of memory. He was a prizewinner in the competition for the “Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe” (Berlin 1996, with Reinhard Matz). When the Lenin monument in Dresden was due to be toppled, he suggested preserving it in situ as a toppled monument. After “Lenin’s camp” had failed, he realized “Lenin on Tour” in 2004 and travelled through Europe with the monument for a month – under the motto “I am showing Lenin to my contemporaries. And Lenin the 21st century. Who will explain it to him?”
Nicole Six and Paul Petritsch have been collaborating since 1997 on films, photographs, displays, artist’s books, and site- and context-specific installations and projects in public spaces. Since 2014, Paul Petritsch has been Head of the Department of Site-Specific Art at the University of Applied Arts. They designed the exhibition “Putting Up Resistance? | Ustanovitev odpora?” and the film “Drugi spomenik | The Other Monument”, 2025. Previous projects include: “Shared Space – Keeping Spaces Open Together”, Leipzig 2025; “LuegerTemporär”, 2022–2023; “The internal Border I Notranja meja”, 100th anniversary of the Carinthian referendum, 2020; “The Monument | spomenik”, Kunstraum Lakeside, 2015.
zweintopf (founded in 2006, Graz) is an artist duo comprising Eva Pichler and Gerhard Pichler. They work on a “poetry of trivial things” and – alongside site-specific installations, objects, and videos – develop ideas that are realized as art in public spaces or in the form of unannounced interventions. The duo lives in Feldbach.
