Reactions to a Complex World
November 24, 2016–April 23, 2017
11 new installations by a selection of the world’s leading designers unveiled in the opening exhibition of new Design Museum in Kensington.
Fear and Love, the opening exhibition at the Design Museum in Kensington, presents 11 installations by some of the most innovative and thought-provoking designers and architects working today. These newly commissioned works explore a spectrum of issues that define our time, including networked sexuality, sentient robots, slow fashion and settled nomads. The exhibition shows how design is deeply connected not just to commerce and culture but to urgent underlying issues—issues that inspire fear and love. This is a multidisciplinary and global exhibition that aims to capture the mood of the present and establish the Design Museum as the home of design debate.
“When the Design Museum opened in 1989, the first exhibition, Commerce and Culture, was about the value of industrial products. 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,” said Justin McGuirk, Chief Curator at the Design Museum.
In response to the recent Brexit vote, OMA, the architecture practice founded by Rem Koolhaas, presents The Pan-European Living Room.
Fashion designer Hussein Chalayan, the only UK-based designer in the exhibition, has produced a series of wearable devices that detect your emotions and project them for the outside world to see in the installation Room Tone.
A multidisciplinary designer based in Pittsburgh, Madeline Gannon has created custom software to transform a 1200kg industrial robot into a living, breathing mechanical creature named Mimus.
Architect Andrés Jaque, based in New York and Madrid, explores the way network culture is defining new forms of behaviour and interaction in his audio-visual installation Intimate Strangers.
Expandida, an activist architecture collective from Colombia, is creating a replica of a school, Potocinema, that they have designed and built in one of the most disadvantaged communities of Bogota.
Tokyo-based Kenya Hara, the graphic designer and art director of Muji, has examined what we eat to create Staples, a graphic display about the most common staple foods around the world.
The graphic designers Metahaven, based in Amsterdam, present a film about the marine wildlife conservation group Sea Shepherd in Love Letter to Sea Shepherd.
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.
Hong Kong-based Rural Urban Framework explores how the nomads of Mongolia are adapting to urban life, giving up traditional freedoms for the difficult conditions of unplanned settlements in their installation City of Nomads.
Dutch product designer Christien Meindertsma’s installation Fibre Market explores the potential of recycling textiles.
Chinese clothing designer Ma Ke presents her ongoing project Wuyong, or “Useless.”
Fear and Love—Reactions to a Complex World will form part of the opening programme of exhibitions at the new Design Museum on Kensington High Street, opening November 24.
Exhibition design team
3D exhibition design: Sam Jacob Studio
2D exhibition design: OK-RM
The Design Museum is building the world’s leading museum devoted to architecture and design, its work encompasses all elements of design, including fashion, product and graphic design. Since it opened its doors in 1989 the museum has displayed everything from an AK-47 to high heels designed by Christian Louboutin. It has staged over 100 exhibitions, welcomed over five million visitors and showcased the work of some of the world’s most celebrated designers and architects including Paul Smith, Zaha Hadid, Jonathan Ive, Miuccia Prada, Frank Gehry, Eileen Gray and Dieter Rams. The Design Museum is relocating to a 1960s building in Kensington, west London. The Design Museum will reopen on November 24, 2016. Leading architectural designer John Pawson has converted the interior of the building to create a new home for the Design Museum giving it three times more space in which to show a wider range of exhibitions and significantly extend its learning programme.
