Dear Friends of the Austrian Cultural Forum,
Another busy Winter/Spring season here at the Austrian Cultural Forum New York has drawn to a close, and while we pause for the summer, we are once again offering a recap of the great programs and events we have hosted over the past few months. Transforum 11 will give you the opportunity to read the press reviews, browse through videos and photos, and listen to live recordings of some of our concerts and discussions.
Our recent exhibition, Alpine Desire, proved a wonderful success. Simon Watson even chose to honor it as one of New York’s best exhbitions at a gala event in Soho’s James Hotel. The exhibition, which included a host of works from the collection of Vienna’s Belvedere Museum, allowed us to play with a concept that is indelibly linked to stereotypes of Austria and its history. We jumped at the chance to look beyond the sublime representation of the alpine in old masters (represented in our show by Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, Herbert Boeckl, Thomas Ender, and James Everett Stuart) and in doing so, juxtapose them with contemporary takes on the alps and the alpine (with pieces by Hans Schabus, Adam Cvijanovic, and Ellen Harvey, among others).
An alpine-themed film series, curated by the marvelous Michael Loebenstein of Vienna’s Film Museum, provided a natural biproduct. Incidentally, the Austrian Cultural Forum also helped to bring rare films by Russian film pioneer Dziga Vertov from Vienna’s Film Museum’s collection to New York. The result was a very successful retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art.
I am particularly proud of the many thoughtful (and laudatory!) reviews our music programs have received over the past few months. The fact that the New York Times singled out concerts dedicated to the work of classical contemporary composers such as Olga Neuwirth, Thomas Larcher, Georg Friedrich Haas, and György Kurtág, shows time and again that we are not alone in believing there is so much left to discover that goes beyond Mozart. We hope you will browse through some of these wonderful reviews on our website.
One of the highlights of the past season was definitely the inauguration of our new library membership program. Literary greats Rick Moody, Dale Peck, Daniel Kelhmann, and Carol Brown Janeway were on hand for a special evening dedicated to legendary Austrian scribe Thomas Bernhard. Excerpts from this star-studded event are available here. The library is an invaluable part of our institution, and its (over 10,000) precious holdings lay dormant for so long: this past April we have begun to offer a free membership that includes borrowing privileges for patrons. If you would like to become a member, I suggest you take a look at the membership application, available online at our website.
As you may know, the ACFNY’s architect, Raimund Abraham, passed away suddenly in March of 2010. In order to commemorate his legacy as reflected in this iconic architectural New York landmark we work in, we published a book last winter, Raimund Abraham & The Austrian Cultural Forum New York. We are happy to see the book popping up on the shelves of bookstores throughout New York City. It is also available for purchase online.
Though our last event of the season took place a few days ago (a stimulating panel discussion between David Bennett of Syracuse University and Max Peglau, of the University of Innsbruck, in which they discussed the right wing shift of politics in both the U.S. and Europe after the financial crisis of 2008 – read the summary here), our current exhibition, Fünf Räume, is on view throughout the summer (open daily, 10AM – 6PM). We will be busy preparing for this year’s installment of the Moving Sounds Festival (September 15 – 18), which will once again feature genre-bending performances of classical contemporary and electronic music, offering up a host of new sound experiences to New York audiences.
As always, I encourage you to browse through our website, become a member of our library, follow us on Facebook or Twitter, and last but definitely not least: come and meet us here at the ACFNY!
Yours warmly,
Andreas Stadler
June 2011
