Kunstgewerbemuseum: Add to the Cake

Add to the Cake

Transforming the roles of female practitioners

Opening 05.07., 6 p.m.: Contemporary cultural constructs have us believe that not everyone can get a fair share of the cake, and that only a limited few can write history. In the case of female practitioners in design, architecture and the arts, their erasure from the history and the memory of their disciplines has been systematic; but in the first two decades of the 21st century, they have regained visibility. In this pivotal moment, female practitioners have the chance to usher in an important transformation for their disciplines.

Exhibition Site Schloss Pillnitz

DATES 06/07/2019—03/11/2019

We can – and need to – add to the existing cake: infinite layers for an expanded canon. Adding to museum collections and to historical accounts, adding to collective memory and to possible futures. Most importantly, we must realize that ‘adding’ doesn’t mean ‘taking away’, but that it enriches the existing context with multiple, varied voices and perspectives.
‘Add to the Cake' is an exercise in enacting the kind of transformation that design, architecture and arts are about to experience. It develops over the course of an exhibition, an active public program, and a series of performative moments over the course of six months.

The exhibition stems from the ‘A Woman’s Work’ symposium, which took place at the Japanisches Palais in Dresden in January 2019, in context of the ‘Against Invisibility’ exhibition, and gathered local and international perspectives on the present and the future of female practice.

Report to the symposium

In ‘Add to the Cake', the exhibition collects and develops themes that were first discussed during that occasion, and frames them alongside other objects and ideas developed by female practitioners. Alongside it, an active public program presents a variety of formats, focusing on establishing permanent visibility for female practitioners.

A timeline in the entrance room narrates what’s happened, what is happening, and speculates on what is imminent for female practice. Building on the work that was initiated in "Against Invisibility" the work of Gertrud Kleinhempel is complemented by two further female designers who had been forgotten, and which the exhibition and subsequent research allowed to rediscover: textile designer Irmgard Harras and designer Erna Sandig, whose work is here presented to the public for the first time after a long disappearance.

The exhibition traverses past, present and future in a series of works that were partly created in collaborations put together by the curators. Among the (inter)national collaborations that have contributed their visions for the present and the future of female practice, are: common-interest (Nina Paim, Corinne Gisel) & Ann Kern (Basel), Chrissie Muhr & Ji Hee Lee (Basel/Berlin), Gabriel A. Maher & Ina Weise (Amsterdam/Dresden), Garrett Nelson & Anja Kaiser (Argentina/Berlin), Julia E. Dyck (Montreal/Brüssel), Vivien Tauchmann (Dresden/Leipzig) and Pinar & Viola (Istanbul/Paris).

**Symposium 'A Woman's Work', 18.01.2019**

Throughout the exhibition space, the Visual Fictions offer glimpses of the future of the practice — complex, multilayered, polyphonic, and ambitious. The narrators of these fictions come from all realms of arts and design, diverse geographies and origins, and their work manifests desires for the future of the practice.: Associates Associates (Ania Jaworska & Zack Ostrowski), Shumi Bose, Sara de Campos, Fictional Journal (Gabriela Baka, Sophie Rzepecky, Teresa Palmieri), Anne Dessing & Michiel van Iersel, Marie Herwald Hermann & Anders Ruhwald, Zoë Ritts & Océane Réveillac, Galerie Stephanie Kelly (Kerstin Flasche, Claudia Kleiner, Michael Klipphahn, Lucie Klysch, Paula Letalik, Theresa Rothe, Nina Schwarzenberger, Winnie Seifert), Kosmos Architects (Leonid Slominsky, Artem Kitaev, Nikolay Martynov), Oliver Klimpel, Alexandra Midal & Emma Pflieger, Kamau Patton, Martha Poggioli, Alejandra Navarrete Llopis & Naho Kubota, OOIEE (Mary Begley, Matt Olson, Drew Smith) and James Taylor-Foster.

Preview: 27.4. – 23.6.2019

In its first phase — a preview, running from 27 April until 23 June 2019 — the project spatially re-enacted the symposium. The public was invited to participate in this process at the Wasserpalais.