28 Sep 2016
A responsive robot and OMA's response to Brexit will star at inaugural Design Museum exhibition
BY Kim Megson
London's Design Museum has announced a host of star names from the worlds of architecture and design will help open its new home in Kensington with a special exhibition called Fear and Love - Reactions to a Complex World.
Fashion designer Hussein Chalayan and architect Neri Oxman are among the contributors providing eleven newly commissioned installations that will explore a spectrum of issues that define our time, “including networked sexuality, sentient robots, slow fashion and settled nomads.”
“When the Design Museum opened in 1989, the first exhibition, Commerce and Culture, was about the value of industrial products,” said chief curator Justin McGuirk. “Three decades later, we now take that value for granted. Fear and Love goes further, and proposes that design is implicated in wider issues that reflect the state of the world.
“By inviting these designers to create installations with such an open brief, the museum presents itself as a laboratory of ideas, and a place for absorbing how the world is changing.”
OMA will present The Pan-European Living Room; a response to the UK’s recent vote to leave the European Union (EU). Furnished with a piece of design from each of the 28 EU member states, the installation proposes “that our very notion of the domestic interior has been shaped by an ideal of European cooperation and trade.”
Meanwhile, fashion designer Hussein Chalayan has produced a series of wearable devices that detect your emotions and project them for the outside world to see in a space titled Room Tone. The installation will address the idea of repressed emotions, desires and everyday anxieties.
The other installations are as follows:
• Designer Madeline Gannon has created custom software to transform a 1200kg industrial robot into a living, breathing mechanical creature named Mimus who is able to sense and respond to your presence as you near her enclosure.
• Neri Oxman, an architect, designer and professor at MIT in Boston, has created a series of death masks called Vespers using ultra-high definition 3D printing.
• Architect Andrés Jaque, based in New York and Madrid, explores the way network culture is defining new forms of behaviour and interaction with an audio-visual installation called Intimate Strangers.
• Arquitectura Expandida, an activist architecture collective from Colombia, is creating a replica of a school that they have designed and built in one of the most disadvantaged communities of Bogota.
• Using a transformed yurt, Hong Kong-based Rural Urban Framework will explore how the nomads of Mongolia are adapting to urban life, giving up traditional freedoms for the difficult conditions of unplanned settlements.
• Dutch product designer Christien Meindertsma’s installation Fibre Market explores the potential of recycling textiles by creating an artwork from 1,000 discarded woollen sweaters.
• Chinese clothing designer Ma Ke presents her ongoing project Wuyong, creating fashion that has a strong connection to the land and the rural traditions of China
• The graphic designers Metahaven, based in Amsterdam, present a film about the marine wildlife conservation group Sea Shepherd.
Fear and Love will form part of the opening programme at the new Design Museum on Kensington High Street – designed by OMA, Allies & Morrison and John Pawson – when it opens 24 November. Sketches, models, physical pieces and photography from projects nominated for the Beazley Designs of the Year awards will also be showcased.
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