FOKUS: Ageing

How time flies! For the fourth edition of the group exhibition format FOKUS, Estonian guest curator Sandra Nuut has compiled outstanding design objects that deal with aging in a poetic, experimental, and conceptual way. The exhibition highlights the relationship between design and aging and presents international perspectives that remind us of this fundamental human condition and accompany us in it. While age draws lines on our faces and hands, objects develop layers, depth, and patina, acquire cracks, and thus become witnesses to the passage of time. The exhibition focuses on aspects of throwaway culture as well as the wabi-sabi aesthetic, which embraces transience and imperfection as stylistic devices, and design approaches that aim to extend life cycles through maintenance and repair.

In order to offer an arena for sculptural, experimental, and conceptual approaches to the design of objects, the VIENNA DESIGN WEEK launched the group exhibition format FOKUS in 2022: Every year, guest curators make selections from the local and international responses to a different subject and present these collectively in the Festival Headquarters. A key element of this process is the specially commissioned spatial presentation, which brings together the objects and allows them to unfold their effect. This year’s scenography is created by internationally sought-after set designers Hannah Oellinger and Manfred Rainer, with exhibition graphics by Linnea Lindgren and Anna Rich.