14 May – 28 June 2026
the thing Fellowship 2026
Is design a tool of liberation, oppression, or both at once? From 14 May to 28 June 2026, the Museum Angewandte Kunst in Frankfurt addressed this question with the exhibition Positions on Freedom. Design and Its Boundaries. The exhibition treated its title as a method and unfolded the topic as a spectrum across three interconnected formats: a group exhibition developed through an open call and in collaboration with the museum, newly commissioned works by invited designers (fellows), and a reader featuring theoretical contributions and conversations.
Between aesthetics and norms, designers create tangible objects that define what appears possible. In doing so, they not only produce solutions, but often also exclusions and new forms of normality. Through a wide range of works and formats, Positions on Freedom approached freedom from multiple perspectives. What emerged was a complex concept that could only be grasped, if at all, through its plurality.
The projects presented in the exhibition spanned political and spatial freedom, as well as artistic and intellectual freedom. They rendered these questions tangible through barriers, representations of identity, and engagements with violence and surveillance.
A central observation ran throughout the exhibition: freedom is inherently ambivalent. It can only be understood in relation to its limits and constraints, whether spatial, social, or individual. Design makes these tensions visible and tangible, as well as the consequences of unfreedom.
While the exhibition deliberately approached freedom as an open concept, it was grounded in a curatorial angle that does not define freedom as the dominance of the strongest, but as a concept based on universal human rights and an ethic of care, both between people and in relation to the planet we inhabit.
The exhibition was an official project within the framework of World Design Capital 2026 and was realised as part of the thing Fellowship, an initiative of the thing Magazine. Developed in partnership with USM and the Fondation USM, the exhibition also explored how freedom can be negotiated within the tension between institutional structures and entrepreneurial frameworks.
Anton Rahlwes was the initiator and artistic director of the project. In addition, the scenography, designed by Anton and Lotti Defant, formed a further position on freedom, structured around the metaphor of a “thinking architecture”. The visual identity, developed by Autostrada Studios, likewise constituted an independent contribution to the exhibition’s exploration of freedom.
