Anni Albers: Between Art and Function
An audio tour featuring many voices and new perspectives
Whether art or craft, whether Bauhaus or Black Mountain College, whether in front of the work in the museum or in your own home:
The multi-voiced audio tour of Anni Albers. Constructing Textiles offers insights into the multifaceted artistic life’s work of Anni Albers – a key figure of modern art who focused on textiles and gave them space to make an impact.
Lisa Ebner-Kollmann
Tim Nighswander / Imaging4Art © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation / Bildrecht, Wien 2026
Production: sisigrant / Iris Borovcnik
Voices: Iris Borovcnik, Samantha Pyra
I learned to listen to threads and to speak their language.
Anni Albers
Art, design, or craft?
For a long time, a strict distinction was made between decorative, utilitarian objects and autonomous works of art. A distinction that the artist and textile designer Anni Albers found unnecessarily restrictive.
She wanted both: to create works dedicated solely to their own composition, as well as objects that serve their function and their environment.
The audio tour for the exhibition Anni Albers. Constructing Textiles offers various approaches to her work – from functional fabrics to autonomous pictorial weavings. The focus is less on explaining individual objects and more on thinking in terms of material, structure, and function.
Across 13 stops, various voices are heard: curators, scholars, and textile experts, each highlighting their own aspects of Albers’ work.
The result is not a single narrative thread, but a multi-layered picture spanning the Bauhaus, material-based research, and global textile traditions.
How does the tour work?
The audio tour is free and accessible via your own smartphone – on-site or from anywhere.
With a total duration of about 45 minutes, it serves both as a guiding thread through the exhibition and as a way to delve deeper afterward. It can be listened to alongside the tour, before or after the visit – or completely independently of the exhibition space.
In any case, it offers new insights into the artist’s work and life, her influences, and her era.
The audio tour is more than just an extra feature: it adds an auditory dimension to the exhibition and invites you to take a closer look.
Or to experience the works anew in retrospect.
