Exhibition opening: Packaged Time

At a time when speed, efficiency and automation are increasingly shaping everyday life, the question of time takes on a new dimension: Who has it? Who is losing it? And how can it be made visible, experienced or shaped? The starting point for the seminar ‘Fundamentals of Design with Technical and Visual Media’ in the Department of Art Education at Chemnitz University of Technology was Michael Ende’s *Momo*, the character Cassiopeia and the motif of stolen time.

Over the course of the semester, the students developed their own muesli packaging and
accompanying posters. The aim was not to design a real product for sale, but to develop an artistic and design-oriented object that takes up, imitates and, at the same time, questions the logic of muesli packaging. How does a product communicate? What role do the name, slogan, colour, typeface, image, material and format play? How can an everyday mass-produced item become a vehicle for narrative, attitude, humour, criticism or imagination?
Starting from the fundamental elements of design – point, line, grid,
composition, colour, typography and pictograms – the students investigated how
design generates meaning. In the process, an object, a concept or a figure was abstracted, reduced and reinterpreted step by step: from image to symbol, from symbol to a visual system and, finally, from the designed system to an object in space. The focus was not only on formal decisions, but also on the question of what stance a design takes and what world it opens up.

The resulting works lie somewhere between everyday objects and artistic
designs. The muesli packaging appears not only as a container, but also as a visual system and an artistic stance. It organises information, creates a mood, tells stories, provokes actions and opens up small performative moments.
Packaging and posters thus become interfaces between consumer culture, visual
communication and artistic practice.

The exhibition therefore does not showcase finished products for sale, but rather possible worlds: fragile, humorous, critical or poetic designs that raise the question of what a surface promises, how attention is drawn, and when form and content merge within an object.

Opening / Presentation
15 July 2026, 5.00–6.00 pm

Exhibition
16 July–24 July 2026

Opening hours
16 July, 3.00–6.00 pm
17 July, 12.00–3.00 pm
20 July, 12.00–15.00
21 July, 12.00–15.00

Galerie Glaskasten
Jakobstr. 42 (entrance via Zietenstr.)
09130 Chemnitz

A project as part of the seminar
‘Fundamentals of Design with Technical and Visual Media’
Art Education, Chemnitz University of Technology
We warmly invite you to the exhibition opening and to join us in exploring these packaged
worlds of time.