Jenni Tischer. Pin

For Pin, her first solo exhibition in a museum in Austria, Jenni Tischer (born 1979) has developed an exhibition route in which the formal idioms of minimalist sculpture come up against the history and practice of work with textiles. Pedestals made of colored panels of fabric in adaptable sizes cut across the gallery like unrolled scrolls. Interlocking walls and floor, they display a number of sculptures: open cubes that feature netting like that found on the seats of chairs, and objects whose materiality or form allude to weaving frames and pin cushions. “Unlike conventional exhibition setups, Tischer’s arrangement leaves the question open as to what is part of the display and what is an artwork. Instead, display elements such as pedestals or frames form an integral part of the narrative,” says mumok curator Manuela Ammer.

In Pin, Tischer, who lives in Berlin, addresses fundamental questions: as to the definition of media and the information they can transmit; as to how work processes are inscribed in materials and surfaces; and also why textiles are now again gaining increasing significance as a field of discourse and practice in our so thoroughly digital world. Tischer’s exhibition lays out a space between pins (needles) and PINs (personal identification numbers), giving rise to thought both on the memory of materials and on the encoding of identity.