In space and marked by time. Anna Viebrock – stage design as architecture

Anna Viebrock – stage designer, costume designer and director – is one of the most renowned, distinguished and internationally successful representatives of her field. In her spaces the foreign and the familiar equally have an effect; and she combines elements of reality in such a way that they appear to be surreal. Thereby sources of inspiration include everyday buildings and interiors of past decades, which Viebrock photographs and documents when travelling.

Based on sixteen selected stage sets – a number of which were created for Basel – the exhibition makes Viebrock’s developmental process visible: from the photographs that serve as the initial source of inspiration to the finished stage set. To do this architecture photos from the archive of Anna Viebrock will be used, as well as developmental sketches, stage design models and individual elements in a scale of 1:1. Photographs of scenes from plays and photo sequences of the most recent stage production spaces by Viebrock taken by the architecture photographer Walter Mair will provide the exhibition viewers with the possibility to image the spatial effect of the actual pieces.

A second part of the exhibition will take place in the Swiss National Library in Bern featuring the production ‘Wozuwozuwozu’ (Schauspielhaus Köln 2010).