Christine Bruckbauer Knihy

PRATER STERN STUNDEN presents a series of artistic interventions in the public sphere. Each project is site-specific and engenders participation, designed with the users of Vienna's Praterstern in mind. Over a period of four months, artists Markus Hofer, Patrick Timm, Sarvin Hazin, Omid Darvish, and Martina Tritthart transformed this widely discussed, socially and politically loaded transit hub into a place for negotiation, stimulating interaction and communication. This project creates new ways of one to reassess and reflect upon the Praterstern's function as a „public space“.

The changes and new beginnings brought about by the Arab revolution have made an impact far beyond the Arab world. This democratic movement has also effected a paradigm change in local art practices, and artists have begun to claim public space and to act as agents of civil society. The publication accompanying the exhibition at Kunstraum Niederösterreich presents several interventions and projects that took place in public spaces in urban and rural post- revolutionary Tunisia and embeds them into an extended theoretical context for the first time. Experts, art theoreticians, anthropologists and urbanists from Libya, Egypt, and Syria to report about artistic art interventions in their countries and to reflect critically on the role of art in periods of political transformation.