Live stream Reading and virtual tour of the exhibition

Olga Grjasnowa reads from her novel Der verlorene Sohn, set in the 19th century in the Caucasus and Russia. It is the story of a child who grows up between two cultures and two religions and who has to find his way.
Fremdes Licht, a novel by Michael Stavarič, leads to an icy, inhospitable environment, to the memory of a life among the Inuits in Greenland and to recognizing the protagonist who is apparently the last survivor after a comet’s impact.
The exhibition Traces and Masks of Refugees in the State Gallery of Lower Austria is connected to the topic of both readings. Migration often becomes an odyssey that only ends long after the arrival. Identities must remain concealed and be changed throughout the journey, while the “asylum process” of the authorities is another masquerade. These aspects of an individual identity, a person’s masks and mental bridges between the here and now and the place left behind become an artistic subject in the exhibition: memories, phantasms, documents and fragments. Works on show are by artists resident in Austria who process their own experiences as refugees in entirely different ways, or reject such experience as a label of identification.

In cooperation with the State Gallery of Lower Austria.

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