In Australia as well as in Austria an analysis of the national past came only belated and marginally. The period between the wars and the Third Reich unterwent a process of repression, accompanied by a loss of identity caused by the traumatic experience of the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. This lack of identity is linked with the fate of modernism in Austria.
The Viennese actionism of the Sixties, for instance, can be interpreted as a reaction, as a negatively connoted return of the repressed. The avant-garde of the Nineties is dealing with new forms of narration and defines within this context reality as something that focuses on the part of fiction in the construction of reality, on memory and utopia as the actants of the present.
The symposium "Trauma and Memory: Cross-Cultural Perspectives" that will accompany the exhibition "Telling Tales" will try to find answers to the questions "How do we as individuals and as a nation react to traumatic experiences and how do we treat our memory?" Artists and scholars from a variety of disciplines (literature, psychoanalysis, philosophy) will investigate this topic.