Globes, fire extinguishers, drills, cooker hoods, fur coats, roast chickens, rugs, television sets, circles, stripes, lines and colours:
The Werkbundarchiv – Museum der Dinge presents a cosmos of pictures of day-to-day life with over 450 graphic advertisements from its collection of documents of everyday culture.
Day in and day out, the motifs and forms of a trivial world of consumption and media appear in two-dimensional printed matter. When they land in the recycling bin, their pictures and signs disappear.
The present exhibition of selected print advertisements from the past one hundred years offer a rare compilation of these ephemeral images. They are exhibited in their full characteristic variety and in an associative arrangement. The grouping of the graphics follows from a kind of plundering of our own archives, going beyond the current archival categories and visually testing a new organisation.
The Werkbundarchiv – Museum der Dinge is a living archive that constantly attempts to capture new phenomena of day-to-day culture and to define what is special in ordinary things. The Museum’s collection of Documents of Everyday Culture is not a finished department. The special exhibition “Ephemera” is conceived in keeping with the principle of the “open archive”, which also governs the Museum’s permanent exhibition: the processes of collecting and classifying are made visible, along with possible alternative themes for the collections.
Graphic advertising, as a mediator between the product and the consumer, enriches the Museum’s permanent exhibition of material commodity culture. The appealing two-dimensional exhibits provide a sample of the familiar and sometimes curious symbolism of the consumer society.
These materials, ordinarily transitory in time and space, are now on display for a longer period in the special exhibition “Ephemera”, revealing analogies and discrepancies between the individual images.
Groups of images include historic as well as contemporary documents, underscoring the continuity of recurring visual phenomena and the human needs and desires they communicate.
The exhibition is curated by Lena Schramm / Acadamic trainee at Werkbundarchiv – Museum der Dinge.
For more press information and photos, please visit Presse.
