On Thursday, January 23, at 6pm resident Anna-Sophie Berger will give a lecture at Callie’s.

Titled A Sign In Decline, this lecture draws on one of Roland Barthes’ early essays on fashion, in which he describes sartorial signs as being in a constant process of change, underscoring their inherent instability as carriers of meaning. In 2019, Berger created an eponymous work on paper that depicts a simplified street sign with a smiling face undergoing gradual change: its size diminishes, and its smile fades into a frown. Taking this visual motif and Barthes’ theory as prompts, Berger presents her artistic practice in relation to the economic, material, and existentialist dimensions of cloth as it is shaped into garments and conceptualized as fashion. Entry is free.

Berger was born in Vienna, Austria in 1989. She engages media including sculpture, found objects, photography, video, and textiles in her work to critically examine social and cultural narratives. In 2013, she graduated from the University of Applied Arts in Vienna.

She has presented solo exhibitions at MUMOK, MAK, Belvedere21, Vienna; Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn; Cell Project Space, London; Kunsthaus Bregenz; Ludlow 38, New York; White Flag Projects, St. Louis, among many others. Berger has participated in group exhibitions at the Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; The MACRO Museum, Rome, Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem; S.M.A.K., Ghent. She is the recipient of the 2017 Ars Viva Fine Art Prize, Germany; the 2016 Kapsch Prize for Contemporary Art, Austria, and the 2023 Pollock Krasner Fellowship, USA.