Art needs to risk even more than what, fortunately, it’s already advancing in terms of the creation of truly hybrid forms; beyond the simple exchange of signifiers and postmodern techniques among the "educated," media-related, and popular spheres, which retain their own speeches, circuits, and aesthetic-symbolic systems, while power relations and processes are placed in parentheses, as well as contrasts of interest. Contemporary art thus sometimes builds a vicarious subordination expressed in "cultured" spaces” (Gerardo Mosquera in „Touch The Reality. Rethinking Keywords of Political Performance”, 2016,Verlag für moderne Kunst). What effect can art have today and what means of articulation does it possess in the face of current fields of conflict? To what extent do critical performance practices affect a repoliticisation of our apprehensive global society and art and how do they distinguish themselves from the notions of political art of the 1990s? These are the key questions along which “Touch the Reality” has been conceived.

“The mediatization of performance and action art transports the message of sociopolitical encounters in concrete space quite efficiently—and has triggered a trend parallel.” 
- Holger Kube Ventura

Action art and political artivism both build upon public stagings and the presence of the body in public space. This exhibition reveals how artistic works can assume a sociopolitical dimension and presents their respective approaches to an aesthetic of the performative. It comprises artistic practices conceived as a political intervention or as an action in response to a political situation. The Kunstraum Niederoesterreich accommodates this discourse; in workshops it becomes a processual site for the exchange of questions, which also relate to the aspect of public space. At the same time, the encounters of people with different backgrounds shall establish new transcultural networks that strengthen segments of the public and their interests. In addition to artistic works there are also philosophical positions that address the key moments of political performance.

Curator Ursula Maria Probst 

Catalogue editors Christiane Krejs and Ursula Maria Probst

Editing and Organisation Nina Kohlbauer and Ursula Maria Probst

Graphic Design Wolfgang Gosch 

Translation Peter Blakeney and Christine Schöffler

Copy editing Elise Rieger and Scott Evans

Print Holzhausen Druck GmbH, Wolkersdorf

Published by Vfmk Verlag für Verlag Moderne Kunst GmbH 

October, 2016 

German and English language 

ISBN: 978-3-903131-76-7