Curtain Show

Curtain Show revolves around Lilly Reich’s Silk and Velvet Café at the Women’s Fashion Exhibition in Berlin, in 1927. The trade fairs of the 19th century and early 20th century were places of great innovation in the fields of art and design, and a phenomenal example is Reich’s ‘Café’; but they were also inevitably sites of alliance between political power and design. Reich’s bold exposition of gold and silver silk and black, orange and red velvet draped over chromed-steel tubular frames created a maze of spaces in which visitors and traders were enveloped in a pioneering example of a temporary environment formed by the content of the exhibition. Starting from the installation’s complex spatial position and ambiguous political one, Curtain Show unfolds this dual role as curtains form background and foreground in a meeting of curtain works.