Respect! The art of repair

19 February to 25 May 2025

Conserving, restoring, renovating, repairing and reusing - these cultural techniques are based on respect for what has been found and are a living expression of a sense of responsibility.

The exhibition ‘Respect! The Art of Repair’ is centred on the triangle of repair, degrowth and art. Each of these aspects is echoed in the three exhibition rooms, each with its own spatial focus. Everything is centred around the attitude that gives the exhibition its title: respect. Showing respect as an attitude towards what has been found. Showing respect through preservation.

Repairing usually means restoring something that no longer works, that is damaged, to its former intact, usable condition. To this day, conservation and repair are often manual labour, as useful as they are artistic. So-called mending socks, samplers and numerous utensils from the Pinneberg Museum collection and private loans demonstrate the care and skill of the repair technique.

The art of repair goes far beyond this. Even in ancient Japan, the attitude of wabi sabi celebrated the beauty in the ephemeral, the old or the flawed by visibly emphasising the traces of life and use. Centuries-old tea bowls on loan from the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg in the exhibition demonstrate this impressively.

Contemporary arts and crafts and contemporary art from Western cultures take up this approach. The criticism of overconsumption and fast fashion has given rise to a new movement that is trialling old and new techniques and methods of repair. The term ‘visible creative mending’ comes from the English-speaking world. Here, darning and mending areas are emphasised with different coloured yarns, patches and patterns. Repair and thus wear and tear and re-use thus become a creative critique of consumption; works by artists such as Celia Pym and Ýr Johannsdottir illustrate this in the exhibition.