Stripes and Stories!

25/7-10/8 2025

25/7 17-20
26/7 12-17 & 27/7 12-17 the artists are present
1/8 12-17
10/8 12-17

Textiles are more than materials—they carry memories, mark relationships,
and mirror the world around us. As part of everyday life, they are woven into
our personal and collective histories: family sewing traditions, crocheted
blankets for special occasions, or patterns that stand the test of time — this is
the fabric stories are made of.
Janine Maria Schneider and Nadine Lemke explore textile techniques and
materials as media of individual and collective memory. In Stripes and Stories!,
the two artists engage with the motif of stripes as a design element that
embodies personal experiences and relationships. Friends since their student
days at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, they share a deep interest in
textiles but follow independent artistic paths, each with a distinct focus.
Janine Maria Schneider (born in Dornbirn, Austria; based in Vienna, Austria)
creates performative, photographic, and audiovisual works that explore the
dynamic between body, space, and architecture. During her stay in Stockholm,
she focused on the former women’s prison on Långholmen Island—known as
the Spinnhus—where inmates were subjected to “rehabilitation” through
spinning yarn and other needlework up until the 19th century.
At the center of her work is a performance involving a monumental circle skirt,
created in collaboration with her mother, a former seamstress, in Austria.
Carried across the island by a group of performers, the skirt invokes the
architectural concept of the panopticon: a structure of power in which visibility
is unevenly distributed and surveillance becomes possible without being seen
oneself. The skirt—eight meters in diameter and weighing 20
kilograms—cannot be moved by one person alone; it must be carried
collectively. Visibility, control, and shared physicality are interwoven in this
poetic performance. The site-specific work is captured in photographs and a
video piece on view in the exhibition.

www.janinemariaschneider.com / instagram: @janine.maria.schneider

Nadine Lemke (born in Schwedt/Oder, Germany; based in Vienna, Austria)
works with crochet installations, drawing, and photography. In Stockholm, she
drew inspiration from the exhibition A Philosophy of Home at Liljevalchs
Konsthall, which explored Josef Frank’s designs for domestic spaces. Building
on these impulses, she has created a three-part installation that connects
textile history, personal memory, and formal design strategies. Her work asks
what new narratives can emerge from existing materials through patterns,
originality, and repetition.
Flowers, stitches, ornaments: A large-scale linen print brings together
crocheted forms, botanical motifs, and patterns from Josef Frank’s repertoire.
The print is fragmented and applied directly to the wall—a nod to Frank’s
method of using textiles to shape space. Alongside this is a new crochet piece
made from uniform, hand-dyed triangles. Inspired by pattern analyses of
Frank’s designs, Lemke uses these geometric units as building blocks to
translate ornamental structures into textile form. The third component consists
of found and purchased crocheted blankets—cut into strips, partially dyed, and
reassembled into a new structure. Unlike Josef Frank’s well-known textiles,
these pieces are the anonymous work of women whose stories remain untold,
prompting reflection on appreciation, visibility, and the threads through which
stories live on.
www.nadinelemke.net / Instagram: @nadin_lemke

Text: Lisa Arnold