EXHIBITION
October 23, 2024 – March 5, 2025
Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts
4 W Burton Pl, Chicago, IL 60610, United States of America
An exhibition by The Jewish Museum, New York, in cooperation with the Frederick Kiesler Foundation, Vienna.
Curated by Mark Wasiuta.
The Graham Foundation presents Frederick Kiesler: Vision Machines, a concise yet rich examination of Frederick Kiesler’s (1890–1965) experimental design practice through the activities of his Laboratory for Design Correlation at Columbia University from the late 1930s to the early 1940s. The output of Kiesler’s Laboratory included research, design studies, and drawings that probed the possibilities of his theory of biotechnique, while reflecting on the relation between design, energy, and the human body (its posture, respiration rates, and image consciousness). The exhibition highlights two of Kiesler’s most essential and ambitious projects developed at the Laboratory: the Mobile Home Library and the Vision Machine. Together these projects illustrate the fantastical scope and applications of Kiesler’s correalism: a design approach he conceived to “express the dynamics of continual interaction between man and his natural and technological environments.”
Central to the exhibition is Kiesler’s important but previously unrealized Mobile Home Library, fabricated and presented in its entirety. This dynamic device proposed to improve basic domestic activities, while also radically altering domestic space. In its most iconic form, the library appears as a circular series of bookshelves; the entire piece is ambulatory, with each module also designed to spin within the Library’s ring frame. The exhibition also includes Kiesler’s drawings and studies for his Vision Machine, an ambitious device intended to visualize human sight—from optics and nerve stimuli to dream content and dream images. The selection of more than 100 drawings, photographs, and research studies of these projects will illuminate Kiesler’s remarkable attempts to grasp human vision, record dreams, and to correlate libraries, information, images, and consciousness
This exhibition marks Kiesler’s return to the Graham Foundation; in 1957 he was awarded one of the inaugural Graham Foundation Fellowships, shortly after the Foundation was established in 1956. Through the fellowship, Kiesler was invited to Chicago in 1958 to present his research and participate in seminars alongside other fellows, including painter Wilfredo Lam, future Pritzker Prize-winning architects Balkrishna V. Doshi and Fumihiko Maki, and sculptor Eduardo Chillida, among others.
Frederick Kiesler: Vision Machines is organized by the Jewish Museum, New York, in cooperation with the Austrian Frederick and Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation, Vienna. The Austrian Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, the Civil Service and Sport (BMKOES) supported the preparation of the exhibition with a grant to the Kiesler Foundation, thus making the preparatory work for the exhibition possible. The exhibition is curated by Mark Wasiuta; designed by Wasiuta, Farah Alkhoury, and Tigran Kostandyan; and fabricated by Powerhouse Arts Makers. Special thanks to Gerd Zillner, director of the Austrian Frederick and Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation, Vienna.
More information here:
Credits Header:
Frederick Kiesler, Mobile Home Library, Kiesler-revised photomontage of the prototype, New York, 1939, © 2024 Austrian Frederick and Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation, Vienna
