How long does it take to write a shopping list? Five minutes? Maybe less? It’s a document that is designed to disappear almost as soon as it is made: milk, eggs, cat food. Cross everything off, throw it away, move on with your life. In 2012, Austrian artist Ingrid Wiener did the opposite: she spent years weaving one.
Handwoven in wool, cotton and silk, Wiener’s tapestry reproduces an actual shopping list she handed to her partner, Austrian writer Oswald Wiener, before he boarded a flight to Whitehorse in Canada’s Yukon. The original probably took minutes to write. The tapestry took years.
Wiener, whose recent exhibition at Berlin’s Barbara Wien gallery closes this week, has spent decades making tapestries from exactly this kind of disposable material. Handwritten notes, cucumbers resting on newspapers, and even X-rays of her own brain — subjects that most of us encounter only briefly before displacing our attention away from them. Her work has never really been about preserving objects, but about asking what happens when something normally afforded almost no attention is given an extraordinary amount of it.
Today, Wiener’s legacy is a lot more relevant than what may be readily apparent. Spend five minutes scrolling social media and you will quite literally be accosted by tote bags shaped like baguettes, lamps that look like mushrooms, or stools that look like fruit. Is it cake? I don’t know, because it could be an old shoe. The list goes on, particularly when it comes to woven objects: crocheted bananas, knitted sardine tins, plush body parts just realistic enough to be unsettling.
Somewhere along the line, contemporary visual culture has become obsessed with turning a thing into something that resembles another thing. The more mundane, the better. Our new visual culture increasingly runs on mimicry, and there does not seem to be an end in sight. The object doesn’t even have to do anything particularly interesting anymore — it simply has to look like something else.
Crochet has become one of the favourite languages of this aesthetic. Almost anything can be translated into stitches. The result is immediately familiar yet slightly uncanny: softer, slower, funnier than the original, and requires absolutely not ubiquity. The more useless the object, the greater the satisfaction of seeing it remade by hand.
All of this to say that Wiener’s shopping list has become unexpectedly current, even if it emerged from an entirely different artistic context. When Wiener began weaving in the 1970s, textile was still treated as the poor relation of contemporary art. Weaving, embroidery, knitting and basketry belonged to the world of domestic labour, women’s work and craft.
Painting, sculpture and abstraction occupied the territory of serious artistic innovation. The irony, of course, is that a woven grid and a modernist painted grid can look remarkably similar while carrying entirely different cultural status simply because one is made from thread rather than paint.
Wiener arrived at weaving from almost the opposite direction one might expect. Inspired by the experimental energy surrounding the Wiener Gruppe, she studied textiles in Vienna, where she formed a lifelong friendship with the artist who would later become VALIE EXPORT. She collaborated with Friedensreich Hundertwasser and Dieter Roth, cooked professionally, performed as a singer in Berlin clubs, helped run legendary artistic meeting places such as Matala, Exil and Ax Bax, and later operated the Claims Café with Oswald in Dawson City, Canada.
In other words, for her, weaving wasn’t an escape from the avant-garde — it was one of its many destinations. By the time Wiener turned seriously to Gobelin tapestry, the medium was considered hopelessly unfashionable. As she later recalled, there was no money in it and, if anyone thought about it at all, they thought of it as craft. Precisely for that reason, it seemed full of possibility.
“I wanted to make something new out of this old-fashioned art form,”
she said, before inviting Roth into the process.
Together they expanded the idea of what tapestry could comprise. Mundane became monumental. Philosophical ideas became woven structures. Personal correspondence became image. Everyday observation became abstraction.
Roth once asked Wiener whether she ever became bored weaving the same recognisable image day after day. She admitted that she did, and he proposed she use the boredom to her advantage. He suggested boredom itself could become part of her method: the moment it arrived, she should create a “demarcation line” at which point she is not only depicting the object, but also allowing the tapestry to drift into a kind of abstraction. Repetition, in other words, could eventually exhaust the image and force it somewhere new.
Half a century later, textiles occupy an entirely different position. Nobody seriously questions whether weaving or crochet belong in contemporary art anymore. If anything, they’ve become almost unavoidable and oversaturated. Galleries, biennials, fashion collections, design fairs, Etsy, Pinterest, TikTok — they all speak fluent crochet.
Back in Canada today, 25-year-old textile artist and self-described “soft sculptor” Alexandria Masse has spent the past year and a half crocheting her birth-control information sheet, word for word, into a twelve-metre tapestry. Like Wiener’s shopping list, something designed to be folded, read and discarded is slowed down until labour becomes inseparable from meaning. The politics of reproductive rights are literally stitched into the object through thousands of repetitive gestures.
Meanwhile, French crochet designer Entre Crochet sells downloadable Etsy patterns allowing customers to crochet shopping receipts, silica gel packs, and other everyday ephemera. Again, something disposable becomes permanent — but within an entirely different economy. Wiener spent years producing a singular artwork. Entre Crochet sells the instructions. The object can now be endlessly reproduced by anyone with yarn, a wifi signal, and enough patience.
Placed side by side, Wiener, Masse and Entre Crochet tell the story of how textile labour has been folded into contemporary capitalism. A medium once valued for its slowness and resistance to dominant artistic hierarchies now circulates effortlessly through galleries, online marketplaces and algorithmic feeds, where handmade labour can function simultaneously as political gesture, aesthetic style and commercial asset.
Wiener helped establish weaving as a serious artistic language capable of carrying philosophy, autobiography and abstraction. For her, the challenge was convincing audiences that weaving could operate as a form of artistic thought. Today, the language of textile is already widely understood. We immediately recognise the thousands of stitches, the labour they represent, and the histories they evoke. Those associations can deepen an artwork, but they can also become a kind of shorthand. Before the work has said anything, the material has already begun speaking.
The question is no longer whether textiles belong in contemporary art, but what they can still do once their symbolism has become so familiar, particularly now that crochet moves between art and novelty. A crocheted tomato is amusing because it is a tomato that is not a tomato. It just seems like it has become something of a one-trick pony at this point. After a while, it seems like, how many more things need to be crocheted until we move on to something else? Does the limit exist?
What happens when a once-marginal artistic language becomes so ubiquitous that its presence alone no longer carries the same critical force? Wiener’s shopping list still offers one of the clearest answers. The point was never simply that a shopping list could be woven. It was that weaving fundamentally changed our relationship to an object designed to disappear. Time became visible. Attention became material. The ordinary became worthy of sustained looking. Even boredom became productive, marking the moment when repetition could open onto another way of seeing.
Perhaps that is Wiener’s lasting contribution. The value of textile lies not simply in the fact that it is handmade, slow, or painstaking, nor even in its ability to transform the familiar into the strange. It lies in the way that time, labour and material can make us notice what was always there, but had never seemed worth looking at before.
Ingrid Wiener, Gobelins, Films and Dreams, May 1st – August 1st, 2026 Barbara Wien gallery & art bookshop
MORE: de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingrid_Wiener
