to display, to support, to care
Angewandte University Gallery
Heiligenkreuzerhof
Frederick Kiesler (1890–1965), architect, stage designer, artist, designer and advocate
of the applied as a principle that interweaves disciples, created exhibition displays that transform spaces into complex situations:
places for people and artworks as well as their interaction. His exhibition concepts were geared towards spaces of possibility
beyond an infrastructure of the decorative. They displayed art, constructed affective relationships and produced correspondences.
Kiesler’s ideas anticipate displays made to serve artworks, as well as supporting structures that make the exhibition space
into one of experience, as well as a place of encounter and exchange – all of which influence the field of curating significantly
today.
to display, to support, to care takes as its starting point a selection of design sketches
by Frederick Kiesler in order to explore the relation of space, art and viewers, as well as the applied as art’s equal. What
happens when the display is transformed from a means of showing into an affectively charged structure? Into a form of support
that does not just refer to the room’s parameters and the pragmatic demands of the work? Selected contemporary positions continue
to think about these questions. They depart the field of exhibition design to find new resonances in an interstitial space
– between display and gesture, affect and structure, the institutional and its administration. In turn, the rooms of the Heiligenkreuzerhof,
itself once living space, become the framing structure.
With works by Jason Dodge, Philipp Gehmacher, Frederick
Kiesler, Simon Lässig, Joanna Piotrowska, Johannes Porsch and Nicole Wermers
Curated by Vanessa Joan Müller
