"Through Woven Cosmos I try to understand the cultural meaning of weaving beyond materials and technique. This is also deeply linked to the challenges of our time: questions of sustainability, social responsibility and spirituality. For instance: what can be the healing function of objects?"
– Hella Jongerius, 2021

Over three decades, the artist and industrial designer Hella Jongerius has engaged with urgent topics such as sustainable innovation, responsible production and societal regeneration. With the solo exhibition Woven Cosmos, the Gropius Bau presents to a broad public this unique and path-breaking figure from the realm of design and applied arts.

Trained as an industrial designer, Jongerius asks essential questions such as: how can we design a sustainable future through traditional crafts? How can objects be used to heal, inspire and connect? Often focussing on the cultural, economic, technical and philosophical aspects of textiles and weaving, Jongerius’s installations emphasize open-ended process over fixed result. Arising from a durational engagement with the Gropius Bau space that began in autumn 2020, Woven Cosmos shows new works and a user-activated installation that will develop over the course of the solo exhibition.

At the heart of Jongerius’s work is the link between craft and industry, as well as the reparative potential of making. Her research into ancient cultural technologies such as weaving offers much-needed perspectives on prescient questions of responsibility and sustainability. Informed by 25 years of work with textile, Woven Cosmos is rooted in Jongerius’s original philosophy spanning design, sustainability and spiritualism. Through her open-ended on-site research Jongerius asks us to reconsider how we relate to the objects, our world and one another.

Woven Cosmos is the result of collaborative research with the Berlin-based Jongeriuslab design team. Jongerius is developing a number of installations that fill the rooms of the Gropius Bau, including a loom for three-dimensional weaving, a synergetic method for spinning yarn and woven structures proposed as architectural elements. Jongeriuslab will be working in the exhibition spaces every day.

The show is closely entwined with the history of the Gropius Bau, once a Museum and School of the Decorative Arts with its own workshops, a place where different disciplines came together. Taking a cue from this history, Jongerius brought her Jongeriuslab design studio to the Gropius Bau to produce work on site in the months leading up to the exhibition.

Woven Cosmos is curated by Stephanie Rosenthal with Clara Meister.