This exhibition was definitely the most interactive and innovative that I have ever visited and I feel that a lot of other exhibitions I have visited in the past year could have benefited from the techniques and tools used here. The Helmut Lang Archive runs indefinitely at the MAK Museum of Contemporary Art in Vienna and I visited it on the 5th January 2017. It was an exhibition which I had particularly high hopes for, having already read about it on Vogue.com, where I learnt that it was established after a fire destroyed a lot of Lang's original archive (L. Borrelli-Persson, 2016) and the remaining garments were distributed across museums of the world.
Upon entering the exhibit, there was a large scale projection of runway shows on a cycle with stools provided to sit and watch. There were also large posters of past campaigns spread on numerous walls which, along with the bare and industrial feel of the room, really felt consistent with the Helmut Lang brand. The pieces were laid out in a very organised manner and all of the items were encased in glass boxes which created an exclusive/significant vibe to the exhibition. One of my favourite pieces in the archive was a taxi cab advert used in NYC for Barney's department store. This was a great example of the unique approach the curator of the archive had and as a result, I felt like I had learned a lot about the brand's history in commercial terms as well as garment and trend.
The greatest aspect of interactivity to me was the use of tablets and barcodes. The idea of the exhibition being a collective archive was really exaggerated by the huge stock of garments in rows of drawers which, although not accessible for visitors to physically view, could be seen by scanning the code assigned to a particular piece and viewing its corresponding image on the tablets. I feel that this technique could be adopted for a lot more exhibitions worldwide as it makes the designer/artist's work much more conveniently available and cuts costs for the curators in terms of hiring large enough spaces to display and preserve the pieces.
- Borrelli-Persson, L. (2016). Attention, Helmut Heads—Five ‘90s Helmut Lang Shows Are Now Live on Vogue Runway!. Retrieved from http://www.vogue.com/13417811/helmut-lang-90s-archives-vogue-runway/.
- Lang, H. (2016). Helmut Lang Archive. Exhibited at the Austrian Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna, Austria, 5th July 2016Borrelli-Persson, L. (2016). Attention, Helmut Heads—Five ‘90s Helmut Lang Shows Are Now Live on Vogue Runway!. Retrieved from http://www.vogue.com/13417811/helmut-lang-90s-archives-vogue-runway/.
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