In this Convo Club edition we will deal with the fiercely contested term “home.” Departing from the art works by Jasmina Cibic, Jeremy Deller and Ian Hamilton Finlay, we will discuss issues such as the role of art and literature, in defying a coherent, sentimental understanding of “home” and the possibilities art and literature possess to display a multifaceted and multi-layered society. What about the necessity of fighting against a regressive, glorified idea of “home” and which stylistic devices and possibilities are there to deconstruct simplified concepts? Author and artist Christoph Szalay and author Nava Ebrahimi will discuss these issues based on their own work: Ebrahimi dealt with memory, the past, and her country of birth Iran in her debut novel “Sechzehn Wörter” (Sixteen Words). Szalay was featured in last year’s steirischer herbst with his installation “Heimat,” which juxtaposed pseudo-poetic definitions of home taken from a video by the Identitäre Bewegung, with his own poetry, which expresses his own love-hate relationship with home in poetic readymades and theory fragments.

Convo Club is the young conversation format at the Künstlerhaus: Saturdays at 3 p.m. discussions on current topics are being held with interesting guests from art and literature, while enjoying a cold drink.

Nava Ebrahimi (*1978 Teheran, lives in Graz) studied journalism and economics in Cologne. She was an editor at the Financial Times Germany and the StadtRevue Cologne. She was a finalist at the Open Mike literature prize and completed the Bavarian Academy of Writing. For her first novel Sechzehn Wörter (2017), she received the Austrian Book Prize in the category debut. In Spring 2020, she will release her next novel.

Christoph Szalay (*1987 Graz, lives in Graz, Vienna and Haus im Ennstal) studied German philology at the University of Graz and Art in Context at the UdK Berlin. He is a curator for literature at the Forum Stadtpark Graz. His latest projects include the publication “When I walk through the city, I see flags everywhere, and I am always curious if they will speak to me or stay silent” (POGON, Zagreb, 2019), the installation “Heimat“ (steirischer herbst 2018), and the performance with Marta Navaridas and Alex Deutinger “when we turned off the light [we didn’t see nothing]“ (2018). He received the Alice Salomon Prize for Poetry (2019) and a stipend from Academy Palace Solitude in 2018/2019 (art/theory).