to display, to support, to care

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 and the 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

Illustration, Frederick Kiesler, Study of the cable tension in various picture hanging systems in the “Abstract Gallery” for Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery-museum Art of this Century, 1942. ©2024 Austrian Frederick and Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation, Vienna