A
L‘Avventura di due sposi
A miniature bed for the 1958 story by Italo Calvino
The Critical Caryatid
An AI as music critic: a fairy tale about AI, musical rating systems, and automated criticism
D
Damaszener Stahl
Damascus fraud! The knife that would like to be something better.
D
DIN2121
Measuring instruments for the year 2121, among them: the last sextant
K
Kalender–revolution
Variations on the Styrian Mandl-Kalender
K
Kind Hands
Corner protection: a caring gesture translated into an object
King GAFA and the Magical 0–1 Crop
A modern fairy tale about digital sovereignty and platform capitalism
K
Kugellager Publishing House
On the trail of the ball bearing, with a five-year-old who at the time liked spinning around her own axis in big dresses
Mounted Ceramics
Porcelain objects with speculative extensions, loosely following the tradition of mounted ceramics
Stadt der Temperamente
A theatre project taking a comedic look at research on networked neighbourhoods in the Seestadt
Suchagent: Schweren Herzens
An exhibition on search culture on online marketplaces, in collaboration with willhaben
There Will Be! People! On The Sun! Soon!
An exhibition on the cultural significance of solar energy, with historical and contemporary objects
1070 Unseen
A social design project on invisible Viennese realities and the everyday work of home care
W
Wiener Gold
An attempt to reconstruct the history of a place where the Jewish Natowic family ran a lemonade business
CONCEPT
01
DING
DING began as a shared studio and as an attempt to think design less in isolation. Workshop, exhibition, discussion, and shared infrastructure grow into one another here.
02
UNDING
A group exhibition about what it means not to be a Ding, but an Unding
03
CODING
The exhibition gathers questions around code and digital order: How do you furnish a cyber home? Who wants to date an intelligent Furby? And how is it that something associated with logic, patterns, and order produces such complex chaos?
04
DING DONG
For DING! DONG!, eleven apartments for Arbio were furnished with Viennese design. The flats were meant to let travellers experience a piece of Viennese design culture – beyond beautiful furniture.
05
BUILDING
An engagement with one’s own address, and a neighbourhood talk format for gathering information
06
KNIT & WEAVE
An exhibition on textiles in contemporary design – embedded in the historical fabric of Schloss Hollenegg
07
ECoC Nürnberg
For Nuremberg’s bid to become European Capital of Culture, formats were developed around toys, inventiveness, and urban storytelling – among them a festival for digital guilds, a search for Hanswurst, and a residency on the Toys of Tomorrow.
08
OFFSPRING
What could an exhibition look like when its visitors have only just begun to put the world in order?
09
School of Maybe
A summer school for experimental design and artistic research at Forum Stadtpark
10
Islands of Loners
A group exhibition on the bed as a setting for loneliness and me-time
11
Besessene Berge
How does one come to own a mountain? And by which spirits are mountains possessed? An exhibition on what ownership does to landscape.
12
Projekt: Berggasse 19
A speculative contemporary interior for Sigmund Freud
Mounted Ceramics
As early as the 17th and 18th centuries, there was a practice of setting Asian porcelain objects in gold bronze or silver to make them more attractive to Western collectors. Vases became candleholders, were given lids or decorative handles. An act of ignorance or successful mediation between East and West? In the context of my research of Heinrich von Liechtenstein's world travels, I took up the tradition and brought old vessels from Schloss Hollenegg's Rumpelkammer to life with new functions, materials and accessories. The result is a collection of contemporary mounted ceramics.
For the exhibition Ornamentum Est at the gallery A1043 in Paris, the series was continued.
I wrote about the background of the project (in German) here.
Toothbrushholder mounted on Augarten Porcelain
(c) Kollektiv Fischka/Philipp Podesser
Fahrrad und Hummer
The yearly ritual of taking Christmas ornaments out of their boxes to arrange them on a tree is perhaps the closest a household comes to preparing an exhibition: both a family collection and a museum display involve a sense of wonder in a transitional moment, when an archive becomes a presentation. For the display of more than 700 historical Christmas ornaments from the Gablonz region (today Jablonec nad Nisou, Czech Republic) at Museum of Applied Arts Vienna, designer Johanna Pichlbauer developed a scenography based on this moment of wonder:
Cardboard boxes — the containers in which the ornaments are typically bought but also hidden in for most of the year — are reinterpreted as modular display elements. Labeled and titled, each box forms a narrative unit to pay tribute to the whimsical nature of Gablonz Christmas ornaments, which popularly and surprisingly include not only angels and stars but also miniatures of everyday objects — from airplanes, slide rules, and handbags to spiders and frogs.
Additional ornaments are suspended from simple, graphical lustres, whose subtle decoration mirrors the ornaments’ smallest component—the bead. Hanging freely, they surround visitors, immersing them in a glittering cosmos.
The exhibition was curated by Kathrin Pokorny-Nagel to mark the gifting of the collection to the Museum by Waltraud Neuwirth. It was shown in the Works on Paper Room of the Museum of Applied Arts Vienna between September 2025 and February 2026.
︎ MAK Wien
︎ 24.9.2025—1.2.2026
Fotos: Esel.at (unten), Pichlbauer (links)
The dark blue velvet star curtain freatures the "Winter Hexagon" — a prominent configuration of bright first-magnitude stars in the southern winter sky. It consists of the following fixed stars (clockwise): Capella in Auriga, Aldebaran in Taurus Rigel in Orion, Sirius in Canis Major Procyon in Canis Minor, and Pollux in Gemini.