Press Universalmuseum Joanneum

The Blooming Language of Money. Floral Motifs on Coins and Banknotes

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Speaking Through Flowers. Stories of Giving

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Blooming Medicine. The Power of Plants

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In centuries gone by, medical assistance was often difficult to access in rural areas. The nearest doctor was often located far away, treatment was barely affordable for many farmers, and the remoteness of many farms required the greatest possible level of self-sufficiency. As a result, the rural population relied on folk medicine knowledge passed down through generations and attempted to treat themselves to begin with. The exhibition Blooming Medicine at the Austrian Open-Air Museum in Stübing offers a survey of the development and importance of medicinal plants, ranging from antiquity to the monastery gardens of the Middle Ages, through to folk medicine and its impact in the modern world. It thus becomes clear just how closely people’s lives were once connected to nature – and how much of this knowledge from earlier days has been preserved and is still used today. Nearly every farm had its own garden where medicinal plants, herbs and flowers were cultivated. The locals knew exactly what the effects of the herbs in their surroundings were. They used them to make teas, ointments, plasters and tinctures, based on traditional knowledge that was passed on mainly by women. In addition to local herbs, expensive spices and ‘miracle drugs’ from the Orient were also traded, affordable only to the wealthy. The rural population made use of what they collected or grew themselves.

Markus Huemer. A Football Pitch Must Be Free from Trees

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Blooming Fields. Into the Blue

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Flowers, personally. Of myths, symbols, fragrance and love

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Analytical Beauty & Flower Sex

Press tour of both BLOOM exhibitions

Analytical Beauty. 200 Years of Flower Paintings

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Flower Sex. The Colourful Love Life of Plants

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30 % Dandelion

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30% Dandelion and Hybrid Pleasures

Press tour through both BLOOM exhibitions

The Kunsthaus Graz marks the start of this year's annual theme “BLOOM” with two exhibitions: “30% Dandelion” brings together about 35 contemporary artistic positions dedicated to the flower and its direct connection to humans, understanding it as a symbol of radical adaptation and resistance, linking ecological crises with the hope for a symbiotic, more just coexistence. “Hybrid Pleasures” is the first comprehensive retrospective of British artist Helen Chadwick in over two decades. Her radical, sensual works enter into dialogue with current sculptures by Liesl Raff and open up new perspectives on the body, materiality, and the motif of flowering as an expression of the hybrid and the living. A press tour of both exhibitions will take place on Wednesday, March 19, at 11 a.m.

Hybrid Pleasures. Helen Chadwick Supported by Liesl Raff

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Michael Gülzow. The Gate to Unreality

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In Michael Gülzow's video installation, which is built around a new three-channel video work, as well as in the trailer he designed for Diagonale '26, the protagonists can not only travel through time, but also effortlessly switch between newscasts, science fiction scenery, and ‘alternative facts’. Through the clever montage of found footage and self-filmed material, the artist dissolves the boundaries between reality and fiction and engages them in a multi-layered and humorous dialogue. He critically examines the tension between contemporary image production (with its rapidly developing technological possibilities) and the media construction of truth (with its frightening strategies of seduction and deception). Through the obvious use of editing and montage in glitch and retro aesthetics, he creates no illusions, but rather reveals the mechanisms of media manipulation and deconstructs post-factual narratives through the self-empowerment of the protagonists.

Cemra. Ziamliačka

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Ziamliačka – Belarusian for "a woman who comes from the same soil" – is Cemra's latest project, performance, installation and labour of love all at once. It began with the illegal transport of 225 kg of Belarusian soil to Poland, where its scent was extracted in order to preserve the memory of an unreachable homeland in the form of an olfactory archive. Smells are powerful memory triggers because they are directly connected to the limbic system. This enables them to instantly conjure up seemingly forgotten memories. The process of extracting the scent took Cemra several months and involved several stages. Layers of soil on Vaseline were changed three times every ten days, then covered with alcohol for another ten days and left to evaporate for 24 hours. Fat and ethanol preserved the scent of what had been taken from the artist. Thus, the extract in the installation remains visible in a hand-blown flacon but not directly smellable. The soil that Cemra presents in her installation in the Needle of Kunsthaus Graz, piled in a minimalist glass cube, is more than just matter; it is a political body that crosses borders, preserves a sense of home and refuses erasure by turning private loss into a shared archive for all exiles. At the same time, it represents the energy that Cemra lost during her years in exile, energy that must be replenished. "True power flows not only from those who stand beside you, but from the ground beneath your feet." At the opening of her exhibition at Kunsthaus Graz, Cemra closes the circle that began with an act of activism with a poetic, melancholic reinterpretation of a Belarussion lullaby.

Fast Forward! Carinthia & Styria

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Climate Change in Styria

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Promotion Prize of the Province of Styria for Contemporary Visual Art & Art Space Styria

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The Power of (Un-)Certainty

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Emilija Škarnulytė

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Camuflajes. Zechner & Serrano

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