Fear & Love: Reactions to a Complex World

Interesting exhibition at the Design Museum looking at how design is moving away from objects to becoming a way of understanding the world and changing it.

Eleven design practices from around the world had created installations to explore an issue. I think if I’d seen them in a different context I would have called them art installations rather than design works but they just shows how genres are blurring.

I had seen two of the installations at the Architectural Biennale in Venice earlier in the year so I felt a bit cheated but very smug! That was one of Mongolian structures for nomads moving into the cities and one by a Chinese fashion design who works with women from the mountain regions of China with the clothes displayed on earth.

The stand out display for me was Intimate Strangers by Andrew Jacque, displayed as two large screens and a series of ipads on stands which looked at the history of the gay dating site Grindr and some of the unlikely uses that had developed for it. Because it was noted that a lot of the chat on the site was about clothes and fashion a number of designers had started advertising on it plus one had recruited models for a shoot on it via the site. It also showed how an economic migrant who had travelled on his own had found friends and a place to live via the site.

Visually I loved the installation by Christien Meindertsma who had taken 1000 jumpers found on landfill sites and invented a machine to strip out the different materials used. On the walls it showed the labels from the jumpers and compared this to the materials they actually found in them. It showed many of the labels had lied about the materials use. In the centre were great piles of fibres sorted by colour. It was like a great artists palette.

Closes on 23 April 2017

Review
Guardian

 

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