With the exhibition Anna-Sophie Berger. The Years, the MAK is commencing the season in the Geymüllerschlössel with the fourth iteration of the series (CON)TEMPORARY FASHION SHOWCASE. Initiated in 2022, the format offers fashion designers, artists, and those interested in fashion a platform for the examination of contemporary fashion themes through exhibitions, discussions, and collateral events. Anna-Sophie Berger’s site-specific exhibition The Years, tailored to the Biedermeier ensemble, addresses the relationship between fashion and time and is characterized by a continuous transgression of genre boundaries. This is manifested through an oscillation of the exhibited objects between the poles of art and design.
Anna-Sophie Berger studied fashion design and transmedia art at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Her artistic practice is distinguished by the eclectic combination of sculptural dimensions, cinematic, photographic, and found footage techniques, as well as her curatorial staging of historic objects or the work of artist peers.
For The Years, she presents garment pieces, including silhouettes from her diploma collection Fashion is Fast (2013), as well as selected artworks from the collections of the MAK and the Theatermuseum within the historical interior of the Geymüllerschlössel. Her fashion practice can be read within the semantics of both design and art. Four sofas presented in The Years, which were commissioned in 2018 by the couture house Balenciaga, and for which the artist used archival fabrics of the French fashion label, can be seen to represent one such alleged breach of genre boundaries: grouped together in a cubic formation, the couches, designed for use by customers in Balenciaga shops, are derived from an earlier artwork of Berger’s titled 4 Sofas (2018), which combined various dead stock fabrics.
Historic objects selected by Berger include Biedermeier greeting cards and fashion photographs of the Wiener Werkstätte from the MAK Collection as well as role portraits from Nestroy productions from the Theatermuseum’s collection. These objects share a connection with the historic setting of the Geymüllerschlössel and the titular aspect of temporality.
In The Years, the artist draws from Walter Benjamin’s concept of history, which is founded on his observations of contemporary fashion and finds 2 expression in the unfinished Arcades Project. Equally crucial for Berger’s engagement with fashion theory were Elizabeth Wilson’s Adorned in Dreams (1985), an analysis of the relationship of fashion and modernity, and Roland Barthes’ classic The Language of Fashion, which appeared in the mid-twentieth century. In her work, Berger continuously investigates the basichuman desire to semantically decipher clothing or to impute readability. This is palpable in, among other things, the no-smoking symbols embroidered on fabric for her sculpture Don’t Smoke (2023) or the shoe sizes that completely cover the slippers of her collection Fashion is Fast (2013).
Finally, a distinctly personal approach is present in the exhibition: vestiges from the artist’s family business for costume jewelry, which went bankrupt in 2004 - retrieved from her grandmother’s basement, or a Moschino suit from her mother’s wardrobe with the provocative caption Waist of Money embroidered in gold at waist height link intimate poetic spheres with rational analysis. Berger dedicated an entire catalog essay to this Moschino suit on the occasion of the life and limbs exhibition, which she curated at the Swiss Institute New York in 2019.
Berger borrows the title of the exhibition The Years from Virginia Woolf’s publication of the same name (The Hogarth Press, London 1937). In it, Woolf combines sociocritical essays with fiction while tracking the history of one family over a half a century.
Anna-Sophie Berger (1989 in Vienna) lives and works in New York and Vienna. Her works have been shown at the MACRO Museum in Rome (2021), at the Bonner Kunstverein (2020), at Cell Project Space in London (2019), and at the mumok in Vienna (2016), among other institutions. She is the recipient of the 2017 ars viva Prize of Visual Arts and the 2016 Kapsch Contemporary Art Prize. In the fall of 2023, Anna-Sophie Berger will start her MAK Schindler Scholarship at its Los Angeles branch.
The exhibition (CON)TEMPORARY FASHION SHOWCASE. Anna-Sophie Berger. The Years will open with a performance conceived by the artist and a conversation on the subject of “Fashion and Time.”
