A new exhibition by London-based design studio Superflux has opened in Vienna’s Welt Museum. The German word for world, 'welt', is used by the institution in the same way that 'World Music' has come to mean a vast genre taking in the Global South while excluding Europe and colonial North America. It’s the same Eurocentric perspective that sees udon noodles and ghee appear in the 'world food' aisle of supermarkets, while spaghetti and maple syrup do not. For Superflux founders Anab Jain and Jon Ardern, whose heritages span India and Britain, it was the perfect ethnographically charged context for their provocative and playful new show.
Step inside Superflux’s ‘The Craftocene’ exhibition in Vienna
Titled 'The Craftocene', the exhibition is split over three rooms, intermingling new installations with historic artefacts from the museum’s collection in a three-dimensional comment on a speculative, post-anthropocene future. The first room houses a vast oak dining table set for a meal seemingly taking place sometime after an apocalyptic social collapse. The mismatched plates have been repaired with kintsugi (Japan’s ‘golden joinery’ technique), while each piece of cutlery is a Frankensteinian amalgamation of found natural objects and broken 21st-century products. An orange shard of plastic from a car indicator housing, for example, is bound to a twig forming a rudimentary knife. The crockery hints at a future in which an ecological good life is remade from the detritus of today.
In the second room, a posse of insectoid gadgets designed to measure weather conditions within the Thames Estuary is huddled. The data the gadgets produce is being fed into an AI language model trained on old books of gnomic Cockney weather aphorisms and spat out as meteorological poetry. If the rise of AI risks separating humans from nature and traditional wisdom, Superflux hopes its installation could subvert that trajectory; using the same software that underpins Claude and ChatGPT to rekindle connections between people, place and folklore.
The final room is most compelling, containing a collection of new sculptures specially made for the exhibition, presented as if in an ethnographic museum of the far future. The conceit is that anthropologists centuries from now might have discovered the remnants of 21st-century consumerism but, ignorant of how we actually live today, have wildly misinterpreted the various artefacts they’ve uncovered. Classic design objects like Wassily armchairs and Nike sneakers have been remade in unfamiliar material palettes and are presented with captions declaring them to be relics of spiritual traditions.
One exhibit is a stack of Alvar Aalto’s iconic three-legged stools, except, on closer inspection, they aren’t a stack at all but a contiguous column hewn from a single piece of timber. It’s as if the notion of industrially producing identical stools doesn't make sense to future anthropologists, so they have wrongly assumed Aalto must have been making a form of symbolic totem pole instead. Elsewhere is a Le Corbusian ‘LC2’ armchair facing a television, but again, something is not quite right with this familiar scene. The chair is made from rusty rebar rather than polished tubular steel. And the television is a blank lump of pigmented concrete, implying that the trillions of hours that humans collectively spend in front of the telly each year might only make sense to a future society when misconstrued as a religious ritual.
'There's been a lot of misinterpretation,' says Claudia Banz, the relatively new director of the Welt Museum, who personally commissioned the show. She tells me that in the past, 'many many many' of the objects in the museum’s collections were misunderstood as Western curators guessed at the use of the various artefacts donated by wealthy Austrian collectors. For Banz, the show is an attempt to stir up debate about anthropological practices. 'Museums have a social responsibility, but there’s not much space for critical discourse exhibitions,' she confesses and tells me she hopes ‘The Craftocene’ can achieve exactly that.
Were the show merely poking fun at contemporary over-consumption it would be an enjoyable but predictable series of one-liners, like Banksy’s 2004 drawing of Christ crucified while laden with Christmas shopping. But the fact that the objects are presented in the heart of one of Europe’s great anthropological museums gives them another layer of provocation. Superflux is not merely critiquing the tropes of capitalism but the entire tradition of Western anthropology too.
'Superflux. The Craftoscene' runs until 16 August 2026, weltmuseumwien.at