FRANKFURT.- Graphic design is everywhere. Whether it’s food packaging, digital interfaces on our smartphones, billboards or wayfinding systems in public spaces—all the visual media that surrounds us is designed to act on us. Graphic design shapes how we perceive, understand, feel and act—often without us even realising it. Through the work of Robin Coenen and Danielle Rosales, Aline Bavier and Sophia Becker, and Anja Kaiser and Rebecca Stephany, the exhibition On Display: How Graphic Design Shapes Us explores the social dimension of graphic design and examines its influence in times of political, technological, and social change.
The way information is presented shapes what we know—or believe we know. Numbers, data and facts are not formless material; they are always designed in a particular way. And anything that has been designed could always have been designed differently. Every design decision is therefore also a decision about content. Under the title Design Macht Wissen (Design Power(s) Knowledge), Robin Coenen and Danielle Rosales investigate how graphic design produces and communicates knowledge—and what relations of power emerge in the process.
The tools we use to design are not neutral either. The history of graphic design is closely tied to technological progress. The rise of generative artificial intelligence is currently propelling us into a new media revolution—one that poses fundamental challenges to the discipline of graphic design. Aline Bavier and Sophia Becker take an assertive stance, appropriating the design possibilities of this technological shift. In their video installation re constructed, they process shared childhood and adolescent memories using generative image models. Media, methods and tools become co-authors of our reality.
The canon of graphic design—particularly in the twentieth century—was shaped by the ambition to establish universal principles of design. In their Glossary of Undisciplined Design, Anja Kaiser, Rebecca Stephany and further contributors make clear that the discipline can equally be understood as an open and contradictory—that is, undisciplined—field, one that realises its potential through collaboration, polyphony and a willingness to question what is given.
On Display: How Graphic Design Shapes Us reveals how graphic design shapes our reality—and invites visitors to reflect further on the questions raised and to reimagine the discipline’s social responsibility.
The exhibition is sponsored by the KulturFonds Frankfurt RheinMain. The installation re constructed by Aline Bavier and Sophia Becker is sponsored by the Liechtenstein Cultural Foundation.
Curator: Dr Jonas Deuter
Director: Matthias Wagner K
