An exhibition by industrial design students at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, Stefan Diez's class

Working with the things that no one else can use anymore: In the exhibition Please offer your seat to anyone in need, chairs that students of the Industrial Design class of the University of Applied Arts Vienna have created from broken pieces of furniture and discarded objects are presented in the gallery FRANZ JOSEFS KAI 3. What otherwise would have ended up in the trash has been revived, reinterpreted, recombined and has thus become part of a commodity again. The proceeds of the auction will be donated to the Ute Bock refugee project. 

,,All creatures with bottoms / no wings / sit. / They need to sit / love to sit / have to sit / must sit.”, writes the Chinese poet Lü Yue. Chairs are objects we often engage with, they serve a function carrying us, at the same time meet our aesthetic desires. When they no longer fulfill our expectations, they are given away, left on the street or thrown in the trash. What happens if instead of declaring them useless, you ask yourself what potential could they have? How can the seemingly worthless objects be broken down into individual parts and recombined in such a way that they become desirable again? The students of the Industrial Design class at the University of Applied Arts Vienna have set out in teams to search for the old, the broken or the no longer fashionable. In short: the unwanted objects. A new chair was to be created from these discarded pieces. These new chairs will then be auctioned off and the proceeds donated. 

For this purpose, the students peeked into dumpsters, scrolled through the endless listings on Willhaben.at and searched the streets of Vienna for potential materials. What seemed relevant to them were not only chairs, but also things that could become part of a chair. Benches and tram seats – worn, bent, with torn upholstery or simply ugly to look at, also an ironing board from a past decade, a satellite dish that is no longer receiving a signal, a piece of bulky metal fencing, a shopping trolley or a cable drum. The objects were then revived as material, understood as building blocks and reinterpreted for something new. They were welded, bent, cut, glued, sanded, drilled, bound, sewn, stacked. Some only minimally altered, only expanded, others modified in such a way that the original was hardly recognizable anymore. 

Working with the old, the discarded, means entering into dialogue with what was before. In this project, the students‘ work did not begin with a blank piece of paper, as usually the case. Rather, it was sculptural, meaning that it had to start out of an already defined material about to find a new form. The process was circular: if material was still missing somewhere, the search began again and the new material in turn led to new ideas. 

The result of thirty-five chairs can be seen from the 21st of May 2021 until the beginning of July 2021 in the exhibition Please offer your seat to those in need in the gallery FRANZ JOSEFS KAI 3. They can be seen, sat on and bought. The proceeds of the auction will go to the non-profit Ute- Bock Foundation, which has been supporting refugees in Austria with great commitment since 2002. 


Concept and project Management 
Christoph Wimmer-Ruelland 

Curators 
Georg Adam, Selin Göksu, Catherine Hu, Lisa Leitgeb, Benjamin Nagy, Liza Sočan 

Concept and design 
Selin Göksu, Catherine Hu 

Texts 
Jana Diewald, Pauline van Gemmern 

Studio photography 
Georg Adam, Christoph Wimmer-Ruelland 
Werkstätte Digitale Fotografie, Universität für angewandte Kunst Wien 

Exhibition photography 
Lea Sonderegger