Stripes and Stories!
Janine Maria Schneider & Nadine Lemke
25/7-10/8 2025
Opening hours:
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
The artists are supported by the Federal Ministry Republic of Austria, the State of Vorarlberg, the Austrian Embassy Stockholm, Bildrecht Vienna.
Special thanks to Slipvillan, Long Island Art Center Stockholm.
Also check out other Arts events in Stockholm, Exhibitions in Stockholm, Fine Arts events in Stockholm.
