Fashion.at

26 April 2021

Austria Insight: Lilli Hollein is the new director of the MAK - Museum of Applied Arts

Today, the Austrian Federal Ministry for Arts and Culture presented the new General Director of the MAK - Museum of Applied Arts, Lilli Hollein who is especially known for being the director and one of the founders of Vienna Design Week. Since 2007, she and her team planned every year city explorations to interesting places for new views on the various facets of design as well as on the impact of the design of products or services on people's private and social lives in communities. The holistic view on applied arts was also an important topic at Lilli Hollein's speech today in front of the press (Facebook stream) where the studied industrial designer (University of Applied Arts Vienna), exhibition curator and design week director pointed out to focus her work for the MAK on the mediation of the fascinating world of the diverse fields and aspects of design via various media for the communication of important topics like sustainability and the environment such as she has already proven for Vienna Design Week.

Image: MAK - Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna, view from the Stubenring. Photo: © Gerald Zugmann/MAK.

As an example for presenting applied arts as part of a story, Lilli Hollein named the museum's collection of laces donated by Austrian-Jewish feminist Bertha Pappenheim who became in the history of medicine widely known as patient Anna O. in the 'Studies on Hysteria' by Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud. The narrative threads of exhibitions built upon a story such as of a remarkable woman like social pioneer Bertha Pappenheim will arouse the interests of a wider public additionally to the group which wants to learn more about textile design. For the mediation of applied arts and culture history, Hollein mentioned strategies for changing perspectives such as the implementation of feminist views or leaving Eurocentrism for incorporating colonial past. One of the topics Lilli Hollein was asked by journalists today was the planned exhibition of the work of her late father, architect Hans Hollein whose estate is since 2016 partly owned by the MAK. According to Lilli Hollein (she is the sister of Max Hollein, Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York), the exhibition is already in preparation and will happen next year.

At the embedded Instagram post, Vienna Design Week expresses its best wishes to co-founder Lilli Hollein and names the new director of the design week:



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