Weekly Paintings examines window shopping as a central public ritual of modern life, one that shapes public space, social differentiation and collective desire. By tracing the evolution of retail display strategies throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, Sabrina Seifried's research positions the shop window as a performative space in which culture, communities, and identities are continuously produced and stored.
Window display has evolved into a distinct cultural form, translating social trends into visual language. However, long dismissed as too “minor”, not worthy of historical attention or too closely tied to commerce, there is remarkably little archival trace of this cultural, aesthetic practice. Further, as retail spaces move increasingly online, practice of shop window display is at risk of historical amnesia.
Through oral history interviews with protagonists and access to private archives, the project aims to piece together an unwritten history of the practice. Ultimately, it focuses on developing a public form for presenting the research, using the same tools and display techniques of the form itself. Rather than treating shop windows as static historical objects, the project understands them as fleeting expressions of their time. What does it mean to archive the ephemeral?
Drawing on the theatrical lineage of window display and its historical ties to visual art, Weekly Paintings will take on the form of a shop window installation as its final outcome—a kind of street theatre.
