Change the System at Boijmans Van Beuningen

Viktor & Rolf

'Change the System' features projects by designers who want to change the world, either step by step or in one big gesture. With work by more than fifty designers and artists, the exhibition gives a vision of contemporary design’s potency for change: can we rid the oceans of plastic, create a world without plastic, use graphic design to clarify and sharpen social debate?
The exhibition showcases design solutions for global problems such as pollution, conflicts, scarcity of raw materials and political tensions. Alongside existing projects, in the exhibition some of the designers developed new works or carried out experiments with the active participation of the public. Some designers created pop-up production sites in the museum, where they designed together with the public.

With 'Change the System' Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen dedicates itself to the resilience of creativity. The museum wants to inspire its visitors to look at social themes through the eyes of creative thinkers. The exhibition shows a current overview of groundbreaking design as well. From young and renowned designers that relate to the theme in an innovative and personal way and dare to work outside the boundaries of their own disciplines.

Curator Annemartine van Kesteren: “I believe that creativity is a powerful means to address the big questions of the moment. Contemporary design can inspire, initiate change or set a transfiguration of ideas in motion. Change the System gives a current overview of groundbreaking work of designers that relate to social current topics such as scarcity, conflict and unanimity. Change the System does not only exhibit highlights from contemporary design. In five Labs designers develop new work or conduct experiments where they actively involve the visitors.”

Designers in the exhibition
Annelys de Vet, Ari Versluis, Ellie Uytenbroek, Arne Hendrik, Atelier NL, Babs Haenen, Bas van Beek, Bas van Abel, Bastiaan de Nennie, Bertjan Pot, Boyan Slat, Chris Kabel, Children of the Light, Christien Meindertsma, Dave Hakkens, David Jablonowski, Dunne & Raby, Dirk Vander Kooij, Elisa van Joolen, Eric Klarenbeek, Forensic Architecture, Gavin Munro, Formafantasma, G-Star Raw, Guido Geelen, Helmut Smits, Iris van Herpen, James Bridle, Jeroen Wand, Jing He, Jolan van der Wiel, Koehorst n ’t Veld, Lex Pott, Maison Margiela, Malkit Shoshan, Manon van Hoeckel, Marjan van Aubel, Marnix de Nijs, Massoud Hassani, Melle Smets, Metahaven, Into the nightshop, Olivier van Herpt, Pauline van Dongen, Ruben Pater, Sabine Marcelis, Sander Wassink, Sarah van Sonsbeeck, Simone Post, Sruli Recht, Studio Wieki Somers, Studio WM, Thomas Thwaites, Tjeerd Veenhoven, Vetements, Viktor&Rolf, We Make Carpets, Yi-Fei Chen.

https://www.boijmans.nl

Maison Martin Margiela

Gucci SS 2018 campaign

Ignasi Monreal created a Utupian Fantasy artworks for Gucci’s S/S 2018 Campaign

The advertising campaign “Utopian Fantasy” features surreal digital images inspired by eras of Renaissance to Surrealism and paying tribute to three elements of Earth, Sea and Sky. The campaign images will be officially released in January 2018. 

www.ignasimonreal.com

Goran Sidjimovski - Liminal Lines

Goran Sidjimovski is a Berlin-based knitwear designer with affinity for experimenting with structures and yarns. His work is strongly influenced by theoretical concepts, meanings and words interpretation, and pushes the boundaries of what knitting can be.

He graduated at the University of Applied Sciences in Berlin in September 2017 and during his placement year interned at the leading flat-knitting machine manufacturer company Stoll. With his graduate collection Liminial Lines he was selected as 1 of 6 graduates worldwide by the Textile Museum in Tilburg to work on a collaborative knit project.

The graduate collection Liminal Lines explores the concept of liminality and interprets its discursive meanings (transition, transformation, ambiguity, in-betweenness) from a contemporary perspective in relation to gender and querness.

The liminality is seen as standing on the threshold. It is flexible and does not have a fixed identity or direction. Sometimes it bends to the left, sometimes to the right and sometimes at both sides at the same time. By working on, and with its own disorientation, it discovers several new orientations and inhabits them partially, interchangeably or even simultaneously. At times it just stands besides the threshold and reflects upon what it actually means to stand on a threshold. The observed queer is aware of the violable binary presence and does not try to move in one strict direction. It understands the feminine and masculine not as opposites, but as inhabiting the same space at the same time. They does not see liminality as a transition with direction, but as a life-long process for critical analysis of hegemonic vicious norms.

www.goransidjimovski.com

Lookbook credits

photo: Carlitos Trujullo
model: Fritz alm @ Viva models Berlin
hair & mua: Gianluca Venerdini

The Vulgar - Fashion Redefined - Modemuseum Hasselt

The Vulgar - Fashion Redefined on show at Modemuseum Hasselt

30.09.2017 - 12.01.2018 

The word ‘vulgar’ was originally used in the English-speaking world to characterize a social class and to describe anything that was commonly prevalent. Over time, this neutral description became an insult. Vulgarity became associated with pretension and ambition, with aspirations to special privileges. And it still conjures up negative connotations – words like ‘provocative’, ‘over the top’ and ‘common’ spring to mind.

Judith Clark has curated and designed the exhibition around 12 new definitions of the word by psychoanalyst Adam Phillips. Arranged around thematic categories, such as ‘Too Much’, ‘Showing Off’ and ‘Extreme Bodies’, Clark and Phillips enter into a dialogue that accompanies the visitor through the exhibition. Creations by Walter Van Beirendonck, Christian Dior, Karl Lagerfeld for Chloé, Prada, Vivienne Westwood, Louis Vuitton and Givenchy amongst others illustrate this complex idea. The exhibition combines historical costume, couture and ready-to-wear fashion with every exhibit reflecting certain aspects of the vulgar. The garments illustrate the instability of taste: what was once equated with vulgarity is re-conjured by designers to become the height of fashion.

Mantua dresses with their extremely large skirts and dramatic silhouettes, which were worn at the English court in the mid-eighteenth century are presented next to creations by contemporary designers. The famous ‘Mondrian dress’ by Yves Saint Laurent engages with copies and reworked versions, and the popular designs by Moschino are confronted with Andy Warhol inspired 1960's Souper dress.

This unique and acclaimed exhibition was previously shown at The Barbican Art Gallery in London and at the Winterpalais in Vienna. For the exhibition in Hasselt new looks from the museum’s collection will be added. ‘The Vulgar’ at Modemuseum Hasselt- located in a former convent- promises to be a provocative and engaging experience.

www.modemuseumhasselt.be

Crafting Plastics! Studio launches 100% Biobased Eyewear

100% Biobased Eyewear Fighting Global Warming 

In November 2017 Crafting Plastics! Studio will launch its first-of-a-kind eyewear collection — the world’s first bioplastic designer frames, created from a new generation of plastics made completely from 100% renewable plant-based materials.

Crafting Plastics! Studio was founded in 2016 by Vlasta Kubušová and Miroslav Kral and is today based between Berlin and Bratislava. The studio was established following a Master’s thesis exploring sustainable and transparent production processes in response to the fashion industry’s exploitative practices. Motivated by the opportunity to develop a product from its very origin, and remaining in control of its entire lifestyle, Crafting Plastics! Studio is revolutionising the properties and the value of the material we know as plastic.

Over the past three years, Crafting Plastics! Studio has been working closely with materials scientists from the Slovak Technical University to create a new form of oil-free, carbon neutral bioplastic material. Strong, malleable and for the duration of its use, the bioplastic decomposes completely once placed in industrial compost, leaving no impact on the environment.

The first manifestation of the material’s properties takes the form of a limited edition designer eyewear range.

About the collection:
The first ready-to-wear eyewear collection is produced purely from our own bioplastic material that we spent the last two years bringing to perfection. Thanks to its pure organic nature, the eyewear can be disposed directly into compost. The material is coloured with natural pigments, such as algae, earth or food pigments.
This eyewear collection comes in 4 colorways (nude, mysterious blue, bohemian earth, orange seaweed) and 4 unisex styles. Thanks to our 3D printing technology, we are able to reduce the amount of waste during disposal of this material up to 90% in comparison to other traditional technologies.

Link to Kickstarter campaign: http://kck.st/2xKXXK0

Crafting Plastics! Studio
https://www.craftingplastics.com/
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The Boat is Leaking. The Captain Lied Fondazione Prada Venice

“The Boat is Leaking. The Captain Lied.”

 Fondazione Prada Venice 

“The Boat is Leaking. The Captain Lied.” is a transmedia exhibition project, the result of an ongoing, in-depth exchange between writer and filmmaker Alexander Kluge, artist Thomas Demand, stage and costume designer Anna Viebrock and curator Udo Kittelmann. The exhibition unfolds on three storeys of the 18th century palazzo – the ground floor and the two main ones – and include photographic and film works, as well as spatial settings and loans from private and public collections.

The long process which led to the realization of this project is not only the result of discussions and exchanges between the authors involved in it, but also the outcome of a misunderstanding. The sharing of a reproduction of a painting by Angelo Morbelli Giorni… ultimi! (1883), generated in the three artists and in the curator different interpretations of its subject, which depicts a group of elderly destitute men within the Pio Albergo Trivulzio in Milan. More specifically, the portrayed individuals had been mistaken for retired sailors spending their old age at the hostel. This suggestion not only caused the marine metaphor in the exhibition title, inspired by Leonard Cohen’s song Everybody Knows (1988), but also the choice to devote a monographic room to Morbelli, hosting seven of his works. 

Quoting William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar “Why, now blow wind, swell billow, and swim bark! The storm is up, and all is on the hazard”, Udo Kittelmann underlines how this collaboration generated out of a “shared awareness, both on an emotional and theoretical level, of the critical aspects of present times and the complexity of the world we live in”. In a dialogue of polyphonic references and constellations between the contributions of each artist, the exhibition spans film, art and theatre media. The confluence of image spaces and scene settings for a variety of atmospheres transforms the historic palazzo of Ca’ Corner della Regina into a metaphorical site for the identification of the worlds we live in and our personal attitudes towards them. The exhibition aims to provide comprehensive insight into the respective production of Alexander Kluge, Thomas Demand and Anna Viebrock, whose artistic endeavours have always extended beyond the aesthetic and imaginative, and were conceived with political and historical intentions. All three artists reveal themselves as pathfinders and clue seekers, witnesses and chroniclers of times past and present.

Out of this, an exhibition is generated, intended as a space for experiences and encounters. This visually powerful, multi-layered environment bestows expression and meaning on the everyday and on the worlds of yesterday and today, between apparent normality and catastrophe, in a society divided between lust for life and loss of trust, extreme distress and never-ending hope.

As stated by Kittelmann, “It is a particularly lucky coincidence that Alexander Kluge’s filmic production, Thomas Demand’s photographic work and Anna Viebrock’s stage settings are brought together in this collective exhibition concept, melding what are usually distinct artistic forms of expression. Until now their different creative fields have prevented them from engaging in this kind of symbiotic collaboration, even though they know one another personally and have often exchanged ideas.”

In “The Boat is Leaking. The Captain Lied.” each visitor can create its own narration in complete freedom, physically and conceptually moving through the visual imagery of the three artists. Through this, three commonly accepted ideas are questioned: the traditional separation between spectators and theatre set designs, the reduction of filmic products to mere exhibited objects and the visual isolation where artworks are usually presented within a show.
The exhibition “The Boat is Leaking. The Captain Lied.” will be accompanied by an illustrated book edited by Udo Kittelmann and published by Fondazione Prada. Made up of three volumes, it includes the English and Italian editions of “The Great Hour of Kong. A Chronicle of Connections” by Alexander Kluge and the catalogue of the project with essays, poems and texts by Devin A. Fore, Niccolò Gravina, Udo Kittelmann, Alexander Kluge, Rachel Kushner, Ben Lerner, Helmut Lethen, Thomas Oberender and Aurora Scotti.

text: http://www.fondazioneprada.org,
images: brankopopovicblog