Kurt Tong

KRAMPUS

Invited by INN SITU, Kurt Tong set out for Tyrol, making his way from Hong Kong to Innsbruck, to Tyrol’s valleys, Alpine villages, and remote hamlets. Inspired by movies like “Krampus: The Christmas Devil” (2013) or “A Christmas Horror Story” (2015), the Chinese artist stumbled across a complex figure, a bogeyman entrenched in the centuries-old but very much alive winter customs of a Central European cultural landscape that was absolutely foreign to him.

Born in Asia and raised in England, Kurt Tong explores such topics as belonging and collective identity. Central themes of his work, which oscillates between fiction and document, between staged presentation and meticulous historical research, are folklore, death cults, and the rituals that connect the hereafter with this world. Classic photography is supplemented by researched graphic material: postcards are shown side by side with pictures from private photo albums; newspaper clippings are combined with studio photographs. The line between factual information and fantasy blurs. Protocol and anecdote, factual account and fabricated story overlap to produce a deeply complex narrative of reality. The Tyrolean forest becomes the backdrop for a horror movie.

The Krampus and Saint Nicholas – an Alpine yin and yang

The Krampus has many attributes and is known in the German-speaking realm by various names: Tuifl, Perchten, Klaubauf. Generally, it is a figure that represents the dark, sinister, and uncontrollable juxtaposed with the bright, good, saintly Nicholas.

The Asian artist sees this simultaneity as an Alpine yin and yang, the universal conditionality of good and evil. In doing so, he ties together knowledge and notion, facts and the indescribable. We wander through an archive of memories, through a familiar landscape, which transforms into the stage of the mysterious. Though absent throughout all this, Kurt Tong’s Krampus is at the same time omnipresent.

Kurt Tong

studied at the London College of Communication. His book “Combing for Ice and Jade” was named one of best photobooks of 2019 by Time, El País, Esquire, and Art Paper. He was awarded the Prix Elysée in 2021, one of Europe’s most highly endowed prizes for photography. His work in conjunction with the INN SITU series is the artist’s first solo exhibition in the German-speaking realm. Kurt Tong lives and works in Hong Kong.

©BTV_Andreas Moser

As always at INN SITU, the concert format is developed especially in resonance with the exhibition: TrioColores responds to the pictures of the exhibition with the entire range of the instruments at its disposal. From the melodic interaction of the marimba and vibraphone to the changing sound patterns of the archaic Music for Pieces of Wood.

We hear the chilling church bells at the stroke of midnight, see the dead dancing, and enjoy Samuel Barber’s sweet melancholy. The soundtrack to Kurt Tong’s KRAMPUS is presented to us by three percussion masters.

TrioColores

consists of Vorarlberg-born Matthias Kessler, solo timpanist of the Hamburg Symphony Orchestra, along with Luca Staffelbach and Fabian Ziegler. With new arrangements of classical music works, the percussion ensemble skillfully established itself in the classical concert scene. In this way it was able to win the renowned Swiss chamber music competition of the Migros-Kulturprozent in 2019. The trio won prizes at the “International Anton Rubinstein Competition” and the “Berlin International Music Competition”. In 2022, the ensemble went on its first South Korean tour with six concerts. Subsequent tours in the USA and South Korea followed in 2024.

©Andreas Moser

©TrioColores_ClaraEvents

Each speaker selects a work from the exhibition and discusses these before and with the audience. An open dialogue between various perspectives, with music and inspired by the exhibition.

Lisa Noggler-Gürtler, historian

Lisa Noggler-Gürtler heads the Museum der Völker in Schwaz. In 2019, she examined the Krampus in an exhibition entitled “Ungeheuer Wild”, which dealt with the unknown, inexplicable, and untamed. “We chanced upon this topic through one of Gert Chesis’s films about a ‘Krampus’ in West Africa that looked exactly like the one familiar to us here in Austria. As soon as you start looking for wild figures, monsters, and hybrid beasts, they can pop up everywhere and anytime.”

Lisa Noggler-Gürtler

Nikolaus Wandinger, theologian

Nikolaus Wandinger studied theology and philosophy in Innsbruck, San Francisco and Berkeley. Guest lectures took him to the Universities of London, Tübingen or Dublin, among others. Today he heads the Department of Systematic Theology at the University of Innsbruck. Prof. Wandinger is President of the Bulletin of the Colloquium on Violence & Religion.

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Michael Fuchs, horror movie expert

The Krampus made a career in Hollywood with several horror movies and in 2014 left an incredulous audience aghast when Oscar winner Christoph Waltz joined Jimmy Fallon on the Tonight Show and described the Krampus’s traditional role in Austria as Saint Nicholas’s monstrous helper who threatens naughty children with a switch and in the worst-case scenario stuffs them in a sack.

Michael Fuchs is an expert on the media phenomenon of the Krampus. He got his doctorate at the University of Graz with a dissertation about horror cinema and is currently a research associate at the Department of American Studies at the University of Innsbruck.

Matthias Kessler, Luca Staffelbach

The two percussionists respond with the diversity of their instruments to the conversation of the expert panel in the INN SITU dialogue. Matthias and Luca are the founding members of the ensemble TrioColores. Since January 2022, Matthias Kessler has been a solo timpanist of the Hamburg Symphony Orchestra. Luca Staffelbach is an experienced soloist as well as chamber, orchestra and band musician. He has played in concert houses such as the Philharmonie Berlin, the KKL Luzern, or the Tonhalle Zürich.

©TrioColores_ClaraEvents