VIENNA.- 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.

Within the Historical Frames of Reference of Textiles and Furniture Design
Tischer’s exhibition contains many references to textiles practice: threads, twines, and textiles (sewn, woven, or plaited) are part of nearly all the works. Tischer alludes to the Viennese netting with which the Thonet company covers its famous bentwood chairs, or to designs by the Bauhaus textiles designer Gunta Stölzl, and also to work from the Singer-Dicker (Franz Singer, Friedl Dicker) studio that was active in Vienna and Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s. “In particular their multicolored interiors and furniture designs that are also very strongly linked to painting and sculpture are an important source for my exhibition at mumok,” Tischer says.

Tischer’s textile pedestals, which she also calls roll-out pedestals, draw on the form of the “roller-blind table,” a pull-out table designed by the Singer-Dicker studio in 1927 for a dining room in a Vienna apartment. When rolled up, the table top looked like a scroll, and it could be extended to seat ten people by unrolling it from both sides. Like this table, Tischer’s roll-out textile pedestals can be flexibly extended to match their use. They can be hung on a wall or across the room, or be laid out on the floor, and cross over one another. Whether the roll-out pedestals are artworks in their own right or just part of the exhibition display is deliberately not decided by the artist.

Display and / or Artwork
Tischer’s use of recurring elements to display images—frames, glass, holdings—is also part of her reflexive approach to the display. Her new group of Makings, for example, consists of round glass plates sometimes with an opening in the center, across and around which the artist draws, weaves, and knots twine, textiles, and mesh. The Makings are similar in character to work-piece sketches that place the process of production at the center. They clearly show that Tischer is not primarily interested in handicraft work for its own sake. She rather reveals known activities and principles adhering to work with textiles, such as processes of tightening, plaiting, or stitching, and uses these for materials such as glass or metal.

Pin, pins, PIN
The “pin” of the exhibition title is a recurrent motif in all of these themes and questions. Pins (in the sense of needles) are used to make most of the works, and are also a clearly visible design element in their own right. They are stuck into various cushion forms, and outsized pins mark the surface of round metal objects on the floor. The “pin” leitmotif not only refers to textiles, but also to the history of information storage, as the “pin” combines both concepts of the analog and the digital. In the eighteenth century punch-card weaving worked with pins that felt their way across the punch-cards. Where there was a hole, the pin lifted the thread, and where there was no hole the thread was lowered. Today we know of the “pin grid array,” an integrated circuit for processors which contains a pattern of contact pins. The other PIN, by contrast, is used to authenticate the user of a machine. Identity is a several-number code.

Material as a Store of Information
Jenni Tischer looks closely at the question as to how materials may “store” and communicate information. An important point of reference for the artist in this context is the quipu (knot), the historical medium of communication used by the Incas, which has only been partly decoded today. Colored threads and knots were used to provide information about a community and its economic, demographic, and personal constitution. Whereas in earlier works Tischer literally weaved in textual references in the form of paper strips, the references in the Pin exhibition are less direct. They have entered into the “thread” of the works and form their unspoken histories. Jenni Tischer’s works cannot be nailed down, as they are interested in points of transition and sensory ambiguities, like a needle shining in light that attracts our attention only to prick us when we try to get hold of it.