CMS Is a Sponsor at VIENNA BIENNALE 2015

CMS sponsors the VIENNA BIENNALE 2015 and looks towards “2051: Smart Life in the City”

The first VIENNA BIENNALE, which will run until October, just opened last Thursday; Monday night, CMS Reich-Rohrwig Hainz invited some 180 guests to the Austrian Museum of Applied Arts/Contemporary Art (MAK) in Vienna to together ponder what the city of the future could look like. What is the impact of social, economic and technological change? And what are possibilities for making the world a (if just a little) better place? These are questions the Viennese law firm cannot and does not want to avoid. For this reason, CMS supports art projects such as the one at hand that aims at creating a positive change in society.

The exhibition “2051: Smart Life in the City”, of which CMS is a sponsor, zooms in on a plethora of topics, from mobility, labour and money through health, housing and utilities to education, consumer goods and entertainment. For all of these topics, the changes to be expected in the upcoming three to four decades are in the focus and, true to the VIENNA BIENNALE’s motto “Ideas for Change”, alternative solutions are sought. The great interest of the guests of CMS is proof of the exhibition’s topicality: about 180 clients and business partners attended the CMS reception, where they were welcomed by MAK Director Christoph Thun-Hohenstein. They then participated in exclusive guided tours through the exhibition on the future of city life, led by the two exhibition curators, Harald Gründl and Thomas Geisler, themselves. (For information on the exhibition see: http://www.viennabiennale.org/en/exhibitions/detail/2051-smart-life-in-the-city-1)

“Transcending boundaries and interdisciplinary“

Art, architecture and design – the VIENNA BIENNALE claims to be the world’s first multidisciplinary biennale and it certainly lives up to this description. Peter Huber, Managing Partner at CMS in Vienna, pays tribute to this fact in his opening speech, “The concept upon which the VIENNA BIENNALE is based is improving the world. Or at least the belief that art in general and design and architecture as specific branches can provide new, creative ideas to this end. Promoting positive change and creating momentum for future developments, that’s something we find worth supporting.”

But also from a purely subject-specific perspective, there are numerous connections and reasons why CMS chose to support this particular one out of the many biennale projects. After all, the changes mentioned will be reflected in a legal sphere as well – in labour law, competition law, intellectual property rights, medical law, IT and data protection law or the fields of banking and finance or renewables and consumer products to name just a few.

As one of the leading law firms in Austria and CEE and a member of the worldwide CMS network, CMS Reich-Rohrwig Hainz is committed to supporting initiatives and projects outside the sphere of legal advice and beyond commercial interests which aim at tackling social and economic challenges of our time.

VIENNA BIENNALE 2015, 11 June through 4 October 2015, www.viennabiennale.org

Among the guests were Federal Minister Rudolf Hundstorfer and the Ambassador of Egypt, Khaled Abdelrahman Abdellatif Shamaa, with his wife, Radwa Abdel Aziz.