Museum Angewandte Kunst, Frankfurt

On Display. Grafikdesign als soziale Praxis

Graphic design is everywhere. From packaging and digital interfaces on our smartphones to advertising spaces and wayfinding systems in public space—everything that surrounds us in media is graphically designed and intended to have an effect. Graphic design therefore shapes how we perceive, understand, feel, and act—often without us being consciously aware of it.

The exhibition On Display. Graphic Design as a Social Practice explores the societal dimension of graphic design and examines its power and influence in times of political, technological, and social transformation. It understands graphic design not primarily as an aesthetic discipline, but as a social practice deeply embedded in power relations, systems of knowledge, and collective processes of negotiation.

Across five thematic sections, graphic design is explored as a language of everyday life, a tool for the production of knowledge, a media and technological network, and a collective and feminist practice. The starting point is our everyday confrontation with graphic design: typefaces, images, and visual systems overlap, remain fragmentary, and reveal how continuously—and selectively—we engage with graphic design.

In the second section, Robin Coenen and Danielle Rosales (Visual Intelligence, Berlin) focus on information design, questioning its clarity, accessibility, responsibility, and political implications. Topics such as authority, propaganda, colonial systems of knowledge, and democratic participation are addressed, alongside the potential of graphic design to make social change visible or to initiate it.

The following section shifts attention to the media, tools, and methods of graphic design—particularly digital technologies and artificial intelligence, which have fundamentally transformed both the production of images and their credibility. In the fourth section, Anja Kaiser (Leipzig) and Rebecca Stephany (Berlin) demonstrate how graphic design can be reclaimed as a collective, feminist practice. Their approach challenges discriminatory structures and dogmatic rules, seeking to break open a one-sided graphic design canon. Graphic design is thus understood as an open, participatory process that questions hierarchies, embraces ambiguity, and enables collective knowledge production.

The final section takes the form of a discursive space that encourages reflection and exchange. A program of talks and lectures deepens key topics such as inclusion, sustainability, the political dimensions of design, and global perspectives—without offering definitive answers.

Curator: Dr. Jonas Deuter