Lecture by Lois Hechenblaikner

For some he is a traitor, for others he is the “Thomas Bernhard of photography”: Lois Hechenblaikner has been holding a mirror up to Alpine mass tourism with his photographs for 30 years now. With the keen eye of a cultural anthropologist, he leads us through the entertainment on the slopes and ski huts of Tyrol, shows the après-ski culture that is as uninhibited as it is technologically advanced, and the overexploitation of the mountains – winter sports as a bath of steel.

When the pandemic broke out in winter 2020, the whole of Europe was looking to Tyrol because the virus was spreading rapidly across the continent from the party temples of the ski resorts, Hechenblaikner already had the right book in his drawer. The publication, simply called ISCHGL, published by Steidl-Verlag, hit like a bomb.

Hechenblaikner is as powerful in words as he is in images, and his presentations are accordingly in demand. In his lecture, he shows images from more than two decades of dealing with the winter entertainment industry.

Lois Hechenblaikner was self-taught in photography. Since 1990, the tourism-related changes in the Tyrolean landscape and their consequences for people and nature have been the central theme in his photographic, filmic and sculptural work, which he translates into expressive documentation and artistic positions.

In 2013, Lois Hechenblaikner was awarded the Photographic Society Positive View Foundation in London, he was ranked among the most important photographers of the 21st century. In 2023 he received the Tyrolean State Prize for Contemporary Art.

Admission free.