The Women’s Museum in Hittisau in the heart of the Bregenzerwald region has been a place of encounter that gives voice to women’s issues for 20 years. The museum was founded in the year 2000 by Elisabeth Stöckler. Since that time, it has housed more than 45 exhibitions on topics related to women in culture, society, the arts or architectural history. The museum highlights both regional and international aspects. To complement the exhibitions, the Women’s Museum in Hittisau offers a substantial number of specially organised custom tours, lectures, workshops, concerts, readings and film presentations. The communications programme is differentiated and offers both adult- and child-specific events.

Current Exhibition

Between the worlds
Born 1915-1935: Women tell stories

What makes a “rich” life? Women talk about their lives. They were born between 1915-1935 and were young girls or still children during the Second World War. They come from different social milieus, some from an urban, others from a rural environment. Some are already frail or demented, others mentally and physically fit.

Photographer Nurith Wagner-Strauss captures in her large-format images what is present of a personality in the twilight of life. She explores the question of how and where the boundaries of reality, of time, of the here and now and of the long gone become blurred. The black-and-white photographs are prefixed with divergent, translucent portraits that can be read as a metaphor for the inexorably approaching removal of the soul from the body.

• More information on the next exhibition
  13 November 2022 – 18 June 2023

Award winning architecture

The building, which was erected in 2000 by the Vorarlberg architectural firm Cukrovicz Nachbaur Architekten, is the recipient of several awards and was erected on the edge of a ravine that slopes steeply down to the Subersach stream at the site of an erstwhile gravel pit. The building houses a Women’s Museum as well as the local fire service and the Hittisau-Bolgenach music club’s rehearsal room.

While the fire service is oriented slightly towards the main street in the up-sloping terrain, the Women’s Museum in contrast is a wooden cuboid that seemingly floats above the fire service and opens up towards the village centre via a large glass front. A radical materials concept further reinforces the separation of the two functional areas by different spatial orientations. The fire service is composed of concrete, galvanised steel and glass. Meanwhile, the Women’s Museum follows the regional building tradition of only using untreated domestic silver fir for the walls, ceilings and floors.