H13 Award Ceremony & Opening of the performance: Fri, 21.11.2025, 7pm
Moderation: Nora Wenzler (Cultural Manager and Mediator)
Welcome: Frederike Sperling (Artistic Director, Kunstraum Niederoesterreich)
Laudatory speech: Joel Valabrega (Curator)
Award ceremony: Member of the Austrian parliament Andreas Minnich representing Governor Johanna Mikl-Leitner
Afterwards: DJ-Set by Mursal
Durational Performance: Sat, 22.11. – Sat, 06.12.2025
For millennia, humans have yearned to shed light on their destinies. In ancient Greece, the Pythia was there to remedy the situation. The Pythia, or the Oracle of Delphi, was the name given to the reigning priestess at the fabled Temple of Apollo. Whoever wanted to know what the future held turned to this soothsayer – and was usually more confused afterward than before. The Pythia spoke in riddles. Those seeking advice had to find the solution on their own or search within themselves, much in keeping with the Apollonian motto: Gnothi seauton – Know thyself!
But what does that mean: knowing yourself? And what about the desire to gain some certainty about your own future? The answers to these and other questions will unravel in the performance project by this year’s H13 prize-winner Stina Fors: Answer me, Pythia. For two weeks, the choreographer and performance artist will transform the Kunstraum into a temporary site of divination (with the support of a ventriloquist's dummy), summoning the ancient seer each day in embodiments of various mythical and contemporary experts on fate, form Call-Center-Agents to Life Coaches.
With Fors’s project Answer Me, Pythia, Kunstraum Niederoesterreich breaks new ground at the H13, too. For the first time in the nearly 20-year history of the prize, the award-winning performance will span the complete duration of the H13 time frame: from Saturday, 22.11. to Saturday, 06.12.2025, Fors will be on location and performing daily during the Kunstraum’s opening hours.
Answer me, Pythia will kick off as part of the H13 prize ceremony on Friday, 21.11.2025, at 7pm in the Kunstraum.
One of the stated goals of the H13 Prize is to offer performance artists the opportunity to network internationally. In addition to the H13 prize money, Fors will enjoy a residency at Kunstraum’s 2025 H13 partner institution Studio Voltaire, London, one of the UK’s leading not-for-profit arts and education organisations.
→ further information on Studio Voltaire
→ further information on the H13 Lower Austria Prize for Performance
Stina Fors (born 1989 in Sweden) is a performance artist, drummer, and choreographer with a flair for the absurd and the strange. Her repertoire of solo works, oscillating between dance, theater, and music, is permeated with tension, humor, and raw energy. Fors conceives her works as a continuous, dynamic process in which the individual elements are constantly reworked and adapted to the respective context – as she did most recently at Cremona Art Week 2025 in Italy, where she merged three works into a site-specific performance. Or, for example, her one-woman punk band Stina Force, where she fuses drums and vocals into spontaneous, nerve-racking performances. Her works have been presented at the Venice Biennale, the Gwangju Biennale, Tanzquartier Wien, brut Wien, the Wiener Festwochen, La Ménagerie de Verre in Paris, Short Theater in Rome, Centrale Fies in Trentino, MDT Moderna Dansteatern in Stockholm, Inkonst in Malmö, La Casa Encendida in Madrid, Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo in Móstoles, STUK Leuven, and Campo in Ghent. Fors studied choreography at the SNDO – School for New Dance Development in Amsterdam.