Same bold stories?

Ausstellung, Klingspor Museum, Offenbach, Deutschland

For a long time, the history of type design and typography was presented from a purely male perspective. Now, research in the field of type design is increasingly focussing on the women who were already active in type production at the beginning of the 20th century without really becoming visible.

The exhibition Same bold stories? sets itself the task of researching the Klingspor Museum’s historical type-related collection (1900 – 1950) for these female positions and supplementing the historiography of type design with their biographies and works. Only a few women such as Anna Simons, Erika Giovanna Klien or Gudrun Zapf-von Hesse achieved greater fame during their lifetime. In addition, there are type designers such as Elizabeth Friedländer, Ilse Schüle, Anna Maria Schildbach, Maria Ballé and numerous female students, for example of Rudolf von Larisch’s type classes in Vienna and Rudolf Koch’s in Offenbach, who are included in the collection and are now coming into focus for the first time.

Starting from the historical collection, an arc is drawn to contemporary type design – by people who identify as FLINTA* (women, lesbians, inter*, non binary, trans* and agender). Self-confident and innovative, they not only help shape typefaces, but also the international type scene. Ideas of collective work are applied here and solidarity-based distribution channels exist alongside traditional distribution through type foundries. The boundary between application and art is often blurred, so that exciting content concepts trigger a new way of thinking about type design and typography in the 21st century. Émilie Aurat, Jin-Hoo Park, Golnar Kat Rahmani and Nat Pyper are just some of the many names that are brought together and contextualised in the exhibition.

The historical and contemporary positions are also interwoven across all thematic areas, which means that the exhibition itself fits into a historiography based on the principle of ‘messy history’. The exhibition does not claim to be complete, but rather gradually brings more fragments into the light. By juxtaposing these sometimes very different perspectives, a new reading of history emerges.

A book accompanying the exhibition will be published on 23 August and offers an informative and theoretical extension to the exhibited works. Through articles and interviews with contemporary actors in the type scene, such as ALT.tf, Nadine Chahine, Katharina Koch, Laura Meseguer and Teal Triggs, it becomes clear that historiography is rarely complete and that gaps can only be filled, if at all, by consciously engaging with them.

The concept for the exhibition was developed in co-operation between the Klingspor Museum, the design studio turbo type and the feminist collective +FEM.

The exhibition is sponsored by the Kulturfonds FrankfurtRheinMain.

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