Walking the Line between Craft and Tech: New Positions in Austrian Fashion Design.

On display will be experimental objects, ready-to-wear pieces, textile art, jewellery and accessories, featuring around 30 positions of Austrian fashion designers and artists, staged in the form of objects, photographs, installations and videos. Visitors can expect a programme with networking, workshops and guided tours.

The exhibition is a continuation of the successful ReFashioning Austria showcase, held in December 2016 at the Liu Haisu Art Museum in Shanghai. This time, the focus is on the contemporary part, which has been extended and supplemented with new works.

Objects: The objects represent the experimental aspect of the exhibition and show the works of young talents who have established themselves in places such as Los Angeles, Tokyo, London and Antwerp. Their work is characterised by an interdisciplinary approach and/or a combination of craftsmanship and modern technology. With references to art, the designers bring to life new creative freescapes and develop utopias, such as the human reconfiguration at the touch of a button project/installation by Flora Miranda, or the shoes that depend on each other to exist by Carolin Holzhuber.

Visions: Insights into individual design concepts are also showcased through a series of video and photo works on display, including a photo series by Elfie Semotan, especially commissioned for Berlin. Semotan shot ready-to-wear pieces of established labels as well as recent graduates of the fashion class of the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. The additional video works show the translation of design concepts into a contemporary visual language in which Vienna as a modern city, away from the tourist clichés, plays an important role.

Concepts: Offering a view from the outside, the works of four artists who explore the creative tensions between textile and craft, space and body, as well as analogue and digital, will be shown. The chosen artists work with sculpture, installation, object and image, and capture the viewer by means of appropriation and unexpected interventions to create new perceptual patterns.