START_UP: Designers’ New Projects Cute Puppies.Young Austrian Designers Curated by Fabrica / Omar Vulpinari Opening Tuesday, September 8, 2009, 8:00 p.m. MAK DESIGN SPACE 5 Stubenring, 1010 Vienna Exhibition Term September 9th – October 26, 2009
The group presentation “Cute Puppies. Young Austrian Designers” at the MAK DESIGN SPACE shows exemplary works by fourteen Austrian or Austrian based designers and designer collectives. The works exhibited revolve around the idea of the unexpected, about breaking with convention and creative
communication strategies in the broadest sense of the word. The range of media used spans from interactive tools to applied artisanry.
Following“Walking-Chair. Happy Landing” this is the second exhibition of the “START_UP: Designers’ New Projects” series presented under the “design> new strategies” cooperation of MAK and departure, the creative industries promotion agency of the Vienna Municipality. The concept seeks to encourage design ambitions and a new generation’s self-definition of pushing boundaries and incorporating unconventional media.
On view in the show is Valerie Gudenus’ und Sandra Reichl’s short documentary “Emothunk” about the Emo, Goth, and Punk youth movements. Dejana Kabiljo’s capricious objects are fantastic creations of curious materials. Featured in the show are upholstered stools from her “PRETTYPRETTY” series. Hair is used here as an extravagant cover material for mysteriously fetishized sitting heads. Designer Philippe Starck chose these for the interior decoration of the new SLS Hotel in Beverly Hills.
Kristian Kloeckl is represented with his works “geo-referenced objects—a location based landscape _for local fruit”—a poster showing landscape visualizations—and the two films “wikicity – connected objects for the senseable city” and “NYTE – new york talk exchange” with a focus on networking and mobility.
The graphic and product designer Grisha Morgenstern addresses the divide between art and illustration as pure commercial art in his works. In the pieces exhibited at the MAK, he combines the media of painting and graphic art; in one of them, he creates an assemblage with a real antler skull reaching out into the room from the ornamental shapes of the wall surface.
Marian Grabmayer designed a poster entitled “Die Scheiße” [“The Shit”] together with Grisha Morgenstern. The piece explores creativity’s unique capability to make everything appear in new light, to combine the seemingly incompatible and to turn even waste into something valuable. Grabmayer’s poster “Il vuoto è brutto – Emptiness is ugliness” is an artistic intervention on a piece of gravel path.
Oliver Grimm will present, under the title “kotoistic”, music pieces he produced together with Chieko Mori at the Fabrica in 2002. “kotoistic”combines the koto, the zither-like traditional Japanese stringed instrument, with the computer, which define the unusual long-drawn and thin sound.
Motmot—Anna Breitenberger and Stephen Kwon Reeder—stand for solutionoriented communication design, which is flamboyant, flashy, and glaring. On view will be pieces from the series “Cheetas Never Win”: saucy comic-style drawings that poignantly and humorously relate to subculture and the zeitgeist.
In her poster series “Suicidal Objects”, graphic designer Johanna Nock shows humanized things that try to kill themselves: a balloon aims a pin at itself with a newly shaped rubber finger, a candle is headed for death by burning itself. These morbidly funny pieces were created at the computer and are what Nock calls digitally manipulated reality.
POLKA—that is, designers Marie Rahm and Monica Singer—deal with everyday phenomena and habits of use. This led to the creation of, for example, the “Polka Pots”, black kitchen vessels mutated into strange pot creatures with their stalk legs and wreath handles. Despite this alienation, they are fully functional.
Hansi Raber’s work, “Miku” is an interactive computer game, a digital shadow play, as it were. Miku is the name of a little dog whose movements respond to visitors interacting with it through gestures or by means of different objects directly on the screen.
Stefan Rauter is represented in the show with an ironical poster, which he conceived for the “Wanted Creativity” project, an advertising campaign intended to canvass young creative talent.
sensomatic, founded by Christine Zmölnig and Florian Koch, presents the interactive fun side project “Discomatic” from the sensomatic Sound and Animations Department. The Discomatic Roboter™ dances with the audience, and people in the audience are invited to dance with the robot.
Tortenhimmel is the title of a project by Dagmar Habeler and Isabel Toccafondi, who work with thread and needle to create exaggerated kitschy confectioner’s decorations, garish cakes and textile pralines.
Katrina Wiedner is specialized on visual literature. She intersperses texts with pictorial elements, which are not illustrations but integral parts of the narration. Featured in the show are her pieces “Heart Disease” and “Pia Sangria”.
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- Anna Breitenberger
- Christine Zmölnig
- Cute Puppies
- Dagmar Habeler
- Fabrica
- Florian Koch
- Grisha Morgenstern
- Hansi Raber
- Isabel Toccafondi
- Johanna Nock
- Katrina Wiedner
- Kristian Kloeckl
- MAK Vienna
- Marian Grabmayer
- Marie Rahm
- Monica Singer
- Motmot
- Oliver Grimm
- Omar Vulpinari
- POLKA
- Sandra Reichl
- Stefan Rauter
- Stephen Kwon Reeder
- Valerie Gudenus
- Young Austrian Designers
