The Conversation Show at Design Museum Holon

There’s a certain interchange that occurs when designers work together on a creative project – an exchange that exists in the action of designing, the behaviours of the collaborators, and the methodologies employed. ‘The Conversation Show’, on at Design Museum Holon until 26 October, explores this interaction through five installations commissioned by curator Maria Cristina Didero. Objects, spaces and interactive works by leading design duos or cooperative studios make the museum’s upper and lower galleries come alive in interactive ways.

‘The Conversation Show’ represents a peculiar approach to design, focusing on the centrality of people and the way they interact with each other. It aims to analyse and portray the shared and peculiar methodologies of working together on a new task, confirming design as a drive of communication exchange,” Didero explains.

For the site-specific exhibition, New York’s design practice Snarkitecture has collaborated with Italian interior brand Gufram to create Hall of Broken Mirrors, a passageway of mirrors that divides the lower gallery into three spaces. As visitors walk through, the reflections manifest in illusions of parallel worlds or scenarios in white, grey and black.

The entrance to the upper gallery introduces Balancing Act, seven works by Reddish, the Jaffa-based duo of Naama Steinbock and Idan Friedman. The pieces – hanging and perched winged objects inspired by natural-history museums – convey the balance and emotion present in this dynamic design partnership.

Coalesque by Vienna’s Katharina Mischer and Thomas Traxler, of mischer‘traxler’, presents a pendulum that leans toward visitors as they enter the space, its illuminated sphere lighting up as they approach, referencing the process of creative dialogue, while Reciprocal Syntax by Boaz Cohen and Sayaka Yamamoto (BCXSY) illustrates the balance and common ground needed to start a creative process. The interdisciplinary duo based in Amsterdam, known for its socially responsive projects, has designed a seesaw that, when used by two people, activates kaleidoscopic projections and sounds that fill the specially designed semi-translucent room.

Venice’s Zaven (Enrica Cavarzan and Marco Zavagno) has invented a new way of layering glass, showing both the process and the finished lighting fixtures produced with layers of cast-glass slabs in its presentation titled Dune. ‘The Conversation Show’ is in itself another conversation starter.