This year, the Vienna Festival has set itself an ambitious task. “Republic of Gods,” paired with the militant addendum “We owe the world a revolution!” — this is not a decorative slogan yet a declaration of war.

Miryam in Hebrew does not mean gentleness, yet stubbornness, rebellion, exigency. Mary is not decorative echo, yet a figure of disruption. A woman who becomes pregnant without a man — not metaphorically, not symbolically, yet biologically.

At first glance, the lineup seems to deliver: names whose work has, for decades, challenged order, taste, and moral comfort — artists who take this promise seriously.

Patti Smith stands as an ambassador of an art form that never settles for convention: punk poet, spiritual seeker, activist — she refuses the separation of heart and mind. She does not merely sing; she demands that the audience feel and think.

Then there is the spirit of Christoph Schlingensief, who infected the German-speaking art world like few others: with illness, doubt, and overload. Schlingensief did not make art to please, yet to expose — the cultural industry, politics, and one’s own moral self-image.

Romeo Castellucci, in Credere alle Maschere, shapes theater as a force field between ritual and the disintegration of the self, while Angélica Liddell counters inherited narratives with provocation and often bodily radical performances. Susanne Kennedy, in turn, approaches seemingly familiar myths — even Wagner — with analytical sharpness and deconstructs them to the point of unrecognizability.

And then there is the Nitsch Foundation, which keeps alive a body of work that does not symbolize the body yet sacrifices it — blood, entrails, ritual, without explanation, without justification. Who could possibly outdo this anarchism?

All of this is serious, dangerous art. Art that does not apologize — aesthetically. Yet, as the program title already reveals, it is a rebellion within a framework of thought older than any avant-garde.

An uncomfortable question thus arises — in the midst of this Republic of Gods: how rebellious are polytheists really?

Historically speaking, having many gods is not an act of resistance yet the norm. Polytheism is humanity’s oldest religious comfort zone — more than that, it is the belief system of the Neanderthals, whose massive brow ridge differs morphologically only slightly from that of a gorilla. This is not an insult yet a parallel: worlds of many gods do not emerge from revolt yet from fear of an unpredictable world, one that is easier to carry when its weight is spread across many shoulders. Polytheism is adaptation accompanied by betrayal and corruption, not uprising.

Not theater, yet an explosive charge against every preconceived “natural order”

And this point bears a name: Mary.

Not by chance. Miryam in Hebrew does not mean gentleness, yet stubbornness, rebellion, exigency. Mary is not decorative echo, yet a figure of disruption. A woman who becomes pregnant without a man — not metaphorically, not symbolically, yet biologically. Against nature. Against society. Against every statistical probability.

And she is only one example of systematic rule-breaking, a chain of ruptures:

By Whose Word does matter refuse its chemical identity?
By Whose Word does illness defy statistics?
By Whose Word does death renounce its finality?

The answer is doubtlessly less revolutionary than it sounds, as logic tends to be: Allah, alias Jehovah, alias God — to Him belong the Most Beautiful Names.

Here, the secular self-image collapses. For the modern secular intellectual mocks Miracles — while simultaneously believing that dead, unconscious matter produces life, consciousness, and meaning out of nothing. Not observed. Not reproduced. Not proven in a laboratory. Asserted. And believed.

The difference to the Neanderthal is not an intellectual one, yet a rhetorical one.
The Neanderthal said: an idol did it.
The secular human says: emergence did it.

Neither provides proof.
Both replace explanation with assertion.
Both believe — only one calls it science.

Whoever insists, without empirical evidence, that life emerges from dead things is structurally no different from early polytheists. There, too, inanimate matter suddenly became alive. There, too, it was an act of belief — only without temples, yet with diagrams.

Against this background, Republic of Gods becomes explosive. Perhaps the true provocation of this festival lies not in the return of the gods, yet in the embarrassing question it raises: who is more regressive today — the believer who openly speaks of true rebellion, or the secular dogmatist whom true rebellion deeply unsettles?

Rebellion is not diversity.
Rebellion is not provocation.
Rebellion is the risk of committing oneself to a Truth that may cost everything.

Without doubt, we do owe the world a revolution — yet not a comfortable, aesthetic one.

And this is precisely what Republic of Gods seems to burden: not many gods — yet the unease of possibilities.

By Okay Altinisik | 24-2-2026, 11:09:38