The Pocket Opera Festival Salzburg 2023 looks behind the scenes of self-presentation. And it covers an intense century in the process. From Max Beckmann to Sophie Calle to the TikTok present.
I like Max Beckmann, Sophie Calle and others
is the title for the tenth Pocket Opera Festival Salzburg 2023. Behind these two names, two differently famous artists come out, for whom the enclosure of an identity has become a theme of life in different ways.
Beckmann is concerned with the questioning of one’s own identity through self-portraits that are often fractured, but at least unvarnished, revealing and exposing oneself, with looking in the mirror.
In the case of the French conceptual artist Sophie Calle, it is about the radical “exposure” of a person unknown to her, whose lost address book, found by her somewhere in Paris, she uses as the basis for tracking down the innocent man at her mercy by questioning the addressees. This indiscreet documentation, which Sophie Calle interpreted as an art action and which was finally published in the daily newspaper Liberation, caused a scandal in the 1980s that still reverberates today.
Julia Míhaly, Oxana Omelchuk, Alvaro Carlevaro, Bernhard Gander and Stephan Winkler have been commissioned to engage with this subject. In an “irritable” and militantly highly sensitive present, which oscillates in the contradiction between attentiveness and preservation of one’s own identity and at the same time lustful media omnipresence of one’s own meaning, the artistic director of the festival and director Thierry Bruehl, the musical director Peter Rundel and the dramaturge Hans-Peter Jahn hope for five highly different perspectives on the discrepancies between private being and staged appearance.
Klang21 will present the premieres at the Salzburg Pocket Opera Festival on November 18, 2023 at the SZENE Theater Salzburg.
