Social Seating

For a whole year, visitors to Pinakothek der Moderne will be greeted by a world of different types of furniture for seating. These invite people to take a seat and interact. The encounter between the museum visitors is staged in the museum space as social seating. The focus here is on the opportunity for open communication with other museum visitors as well as our relationship to seating and to objects that function as seating.

“Social seating” is often used to describe a service that is provided in order to promote social networking. Passengers in airplanes or participants in events can rely on social media data to consciously choose who sits next to them, whereby all data is made available voluntarily.
In the Pinakothek der Moderne Rotunda, people will be able to meet one another spontaneously and sit leisurely on the seating items. The latter have been chosen deliberately to foster shared experiences and help people get into conversation with each other.

The total of 15 seating objects put on display by Die Neue Sammlung are international designs dating from the 1950s to the present. The exhibition reflects on the temporal and social contexts of collective seating, on playful, modular, and experimental proposals, and on how industrial design is rethinking its methods as regards materials and sustainability.

Against the backdrop of growing “social estrangement” triggered by the virtual world and the increasing digitization of social and professional life, our Social Seating exhibition seeks to broach direct contact between people and promote analog conversations.

In this context, the Rotunda will assume a new quality. It will for the duration of the show function as a shared leisure-time space and communicative center.