In the context of a rapidly ageing population, this exhibition looked at how design can help people lead fuller, healthier and more rewarding lives into old age, asking the question: how can designers meet the challenge of an ageing society? New Old was organised into six sections – Ageing, Identity, Home, Community, Working and Mobility – with each part featuring a special commission by a leading designer or design team, creating new solutions for demographic change.
Yves Béhar / Fuseproject created a lightweight fabric garment incorporating motors, sensors and artificial intelligence, providing support for the wearer’s torso, hips and legs. Special Projects created an installation where members of the public could engage in conversation with a real – older – person. Konstantin Grcic, meanwhile, designed a mesh structure offering a secluded outdoor space for working and thinking, intended to symbolise a departure from the stereotypes of ageing.
Curator: Jeremy Myerson.
Commissioned designers: Yves Béhar / fuseproject, Future Facility, Konstantin Grcic, IDEO, Priestman Goode, Special Projects.
Designer Maker User is the Design Museum’s permanent collection display, made especially for the museum’s Kensington premises. It features almost 1000 items of twentieth and twenty-first century design, viewed from the perspective of the designer, manufacturer and user. The exhibition covers a broad range of design disciplines: from architecture and engineering; to the digital world, fashion and graphics.
The Designer segment of the exhibition explores the ways in which the thought-process of the designer informs projects at every scale, with exhibits that include Kinneir and Calvert’s British road signage system. The Maker section traces the evolution of manufacturing, from Thonet bentwood cafe chairs and Model T Ford cars to robotic arms and 3D printing. The display on the User explores the interaction between people and the brands that have come to define the modern world, including Braun, Olivetti, Sony and Apple.
Curator: Alex Newson.
Exhibition design: Studio Myerscough.
Image above: a display of items suggested by the public for inclusion in the exhibition.
Design Museum, London / November 2016 - February 2017
Beazley Designs of the Year is an annual exhibition celebrating the world’s best designs. This was the ninth installment of the exhibition, and the first to be staged after the Design Museum’s move to its new home in Kensington. Comprised of over 70 nominations proposed by an international panel, the exhibition presented designs from around the world in the previous 12 months across six categories: Architecture, Digital, Fashion, Graphics, Product and Transport.
The nominees included the recently completed Tate Modern Switch House by Herzog & de Meuron, as well as the much-celebrated Prada Foundation in Milan by Rem Koolhaus / OMA, both included in the Architecture category. The SH:24 online STI testing kit, as well as a video game entitled This War of Mine, were both nominated in Digital; whilst a drinkable book made it onto the Product shortlist. However, the prize was taken by a flat-pack refugee shelter designed by IKEA Foundation.
Curator: Gemma Curtin.
Image above: album cover design by Jonathan Barnbrook, for David Bowie’s Blackstar.
Image below: installation photograph.
Design Museum, London / November 2016 - April 2017
Fear and Love was the first exhibition to be staged in the main gallery of the Design Museum after the latter’s move to Kensington. The exhibition presented installations by eleven designers and architects, newly commissioned works that explored a spectrum of contemporary issues including networked sexuality, sentient robots and slow fashion. The exhibition showed how design is deeply connected not just to commerce and culture but to urgent underlying issues – issues that inspire fear and love.
The Spanish architect Andrés Jaque presented an audio-visual installation, one reflecting how our pursuit of sex and love through social media is changing the way we view the city, our bodies and our identity. The American multidisciplinary designer Madeline Gannon used custom software to transform a 1200kg industrial robot into a living, breathing mechanical creature named Mimus. Meanwhile Chinese designer Ma Ke presented her ongoing project Wuyong (‘Useless’), clothes that have a strong connection to the land and to the traditions of rural China. These and other installations in this multidisciplinary and global exhibition aimed to capture the mood of the present.
Exhibitors: Arquitectura Expandida, Hussein Chalayan, Madeline Gannon, Kenya Hara, Andrés Jaque, Ma Ke, Christien Meindertsma, Metahaven, OMA / AMO, Neri Oxman, Rural Urban Framework.
Curator: Justin McGuirk.
Exhibition design: Sam Jacob Studio and OK-RM.
Image above: exhibition graphic by Thomas Traum.
Image below: installation photograph.
This was the first institutional solo exhibition in Scandinavia for the American artist Leigh Ledare, and included photographs, texts, film and archival material. Ledare’s works feature people from the artist’s own life: his mother, his ex-wife, collectors and patrons as well as himself, often in situations of a sexual nature. The exhibition followed Ledare’s interest in how we are formed as subjects, while provocatively exploring issues related to identity, desire and morality.
The exhibition, entitled Leigh Ledare, et al., brought together a wide span of Ledare’s practice: including his most recent body of work, An Invitation (2012), based on a non-disclosure agreement the artist signed with a well-known married couple, who had commissioned Ledare to make a series of erotic photographs of the wife; to the artist’s notorious series Pretend You’re Actually Alive (2000–08), made in collaboration with his ex-ballerina mother, forming an ambiguous portrayal of their relationship.
Organising partners: WIELS, Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels, and Kunsthal Charlottenborg.
Publication: edited by Elena Filipovic, published by Mousse Publishing.
Image above: Leigh Ledare, Alma, 2012, oil stick and ink on c-print.
Koester’s exhibition, entitled If One Thing Moves, Everything Moves, featured a dramatic staging that was conceived in collaboration with the artist. The installation took the form of a darkened and immersive environment that included a number of large wooden structures, transforming the grand gallery spaces in Charlottenborg’s south wing. The result had a strong experiential character, and one which emphasised the artist’s preoccupation with the body and performance – and with the hidden knowledge that might reside in the body.
Curators: Mark Sladen with Stine Hebert.
Publication: Charlottenborg collaborated with a number of other institutions to publish a book on Koester’s work, co-published with Mousse Publishing in 2014.
Image above: Joachim Koester, Numerous Incidents of Indefinite Outcome, 2007 (installation at Charlottenborg, 2012, photo by Anders Sune Berg).
Mackie’s exhibition was conceived as a single installation in two main parts. In the first galleries a host of found and crafted objects were arranged on makeshift tables and shelves, reflecting the artist’s studio environment. This sequence followed a principle of repetition and morphosis that runs through Mackie’s work as a whole. The second part of the exhibition, displayed in the last gallery, contained a fretwork of steel bars that supported photographs depicting solitary figures looking at computer screens − alluding to the virtual connections between apparently isolated individuals.
Organising partners: Chisenhale Gallery, London and Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen.
Publication: edited by Rhea Dall; published by Motto.
Image above: Christina Mackie, The Judges II, 2012 (detail, photo by Anders Sune Berg).
The floor panels of Kilpper’s pavilion were designed to also function as woodcut printing blocks, and the artist has subsequently been using them to produce a variety of prints: in both fabric and paper; including single portraits and larger groups. The exhibition at Charlottenborg featured the entire floor from Venice, as well as a wide variety of prints – many of which were created in situ in the gallery. Other elements included a megaphone, which the artist made so that visitors in Venice could exercise their freedom of speech, while an 18 metre-wide banner printed from the floor was hung on Charlottenborg’s Nyhavn facade.
Curators: Mark Sladen with Stine Hebert.
Image above: Thomas Kilpper, Pavilion for Revolutionary Free Speech, Danish Pavilion, Venice Biennale, 2011.
