Art made from useless material

For objects and materials that are unsaleable, superfluous or defective, capitalism has its own term: dead stock. The artist Birke Gorm, born in Hamburg in 1986 and living in Vienna, collects discarded material and forms her artworks from it. Nine handmade sculptures are on display in Birke Gorm: dead stock at the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna. They will be on view from February 1 through June 25, 2023.

Gorms symbolically charges dead stock with her hands. Manual labor has a traditional female connotation, a hard and often unpaid housewife's job. Gorm's artwork rebels against patriarchal systems; her figures stand for equal rights for women and the revaluation of manual labor. The young artist has already been able to attract attention: In 2020, she won a recognition award as part of the STRABAG Artaward International.