KAKANIA III

Event information

DOORS 7PM
There has been no one city’s culture, at one singular time in modern history, more widely influential on contemporary thought than that of Habsburg Vienna a century ago. A time so densely constituted with intellectual revolution in fields as diverse as poetry, fiction, journalism, music, composition, philosophy, psychology, art…that it seems it can often only be evoked through a wistfulness that belies the melancholy, the energy and the seismic change that constituted it.

​​Against these reverberations, Kakania – over 4 events, over two dozen new commissions, multiple publications and an array of contemporary artists – aims to not just to evoke that era, but to envelope it, to transpose it. To relive it in new colours. Kakania is ​new artists making new work, paying their debt to that remarkable period of Austrian history in the writing, performance and artworks they are making.

From the Rich Mix Arts Centre to the Freud Museum to the Austrian Cultural Forum​​ this is a project which explores the legacy of the Habsburg era through decidedly contemporary, original works of text and art which will attempt to be as complex and genre testing as the works, and the people, they are responsive to. This is a project where the past, and our understanding of it, will not be refracted through historical analysis, but the creative process, and one that is utterly contemporary. Kakania will be an opportunity for audiences to discover the Habsburg era in a wholly new guise, that is our era.
Caroline Bergvall on Gustav Klimt
Martin Bakero on Arnold Schoenberg
Colin Herd on Oskar Kokoschka
Marcus Slease on Max Kurzweil
Damir Sodan on Gustav Mahler
Joerg Zemmler on Karl Kraus
Stephen Emmerson on Rainer Maria Rilke

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