CounterAct distributed large posters documenting the dialogue on the streets of Vienna. The poster is a compilation of over 50 examples of "Nigger Raus" graffiti taken throughout Vienna on one day, within a three-hour period.
A 16-month, three religion calendar was distributed prior to the November elections. The calendar shows, through desecrated FPÖ election posters, the fun people on the street have ridiculing and attacking these posters.
In response to the Austrians' desire to know the fate of the Jews in the Holocaust, on November 9th, the anniversary of "Krystalnacht" CounterAct placed ads in the local paper in Vienna duplicating ads from the London Jewish Chronicle in 1938-39, most of them from Jews in Vienna, begging help in getting out of Austria, even begging strangers in England to adopt their children.
At Christmas time, at one of the several Xmas markets in Vienna, the one in front of the Austrian National Gallery, Belvedere, CounterAct and its collaborators dressed as elves, a snowman and St. Nicholas, greeting visitors and distributing "Gift" boxes of the Klimt portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, 1907. This and four other paintings by Klimt were at the center of an ultimately successful legal case brought by a Jewish family asking for the restitution of what was rightly theirs, these Klimt paintings they inherited.
The CounterAct collaborative held several events as public "Oeffentliche Bescherungen" ("Giving of Gifts") in Vienna fall, 2006.
Counteract is an art collaborative designed to address and, hopefully, to create a dialogue that counteracts racism in Vienna today - anti-black, anti-Turkish, and anti-Semitic. The form our project takes is a series of actions in which we distribute posters, calendars, etc. documenting that racism.
German text here.