Design exhibitions to visit before the end of the year

Salvator Dali’s lobster telephone, Studio65’s Bocca sofa, Méret Oppenheim’s fur bracelet or even Najla El Zein’s Hay hairbrush - they are the emblems of a design capable of unleashing imagination and conveying symbolic and dreamlike meanings in our daily lives. Curated by the Vitra Design Museum, this exhibition presents the masterpieces of Surrealist design and includes creations that use technology to overturn conventions and interrogate deep and unsettling meanings.

Coal mining represents an important chapter in the history of the Belgian province of Hainaut, where the CID Grand Hornu is located. Taking its cue from its past, the museum looks at the world’s second largest energy source, which has now become a taboo due to the climate change it has largely contributed to, in order to identify new scenarios and uses that are finally sustainable. Embracing an interdisciplinary approach, the exhibition curated by Giovanna Massoni weaves the threads of a new narrative on the use of coal that finds in design a tool for rethinking use and sharing practices.

From Mitterrand’s rise to the fall of the wall, French taste was caught up in an irrepressible push towards less bon ton and more hedonist design. This non-conformist period marked the rise of many protagonists who would remain so in the decades to come, including Philippe Starck and Garouste & Bonetti in design, Jean Paul Gaultier and Thierry Mugler in fashion, and Jean-Paul Goude and Étienne Robial in graphic design. Through a collection of over 700 objects, the exhibition puts together piece by piece the cornerstones of a production that, according to many collectors, could soon be back in the public and market spotlight.

How can we explain the rich etymological fabric behind some of our everyday words? For the collective led by Malte Martin (with Lucile Bataille, Sébastien Biniek/Structures Bâtons, Charlotte Attal and Malte Martin/Agrafmobile, together with Margot Laforge and Hugo Sandevoir), graphic design can be a tool to intuitively restore the polysemanticity of terms travelling between different origins and cultural appropriations. In this spirit, the exhibition Les Mots Voyageurs is the result of a long participatory project and is located in an old industrial complex in Roubaix, now returned to the people as a space for socialising and experimenting with art. Works and scenography successfully convey with freshness and accessibility a political message aimed at inclusiveness and the valorisation of the lowest common denominators shared by different cultural backgrounds.

Design’s ability to shape the world is a topic that profoundly questions insiders and outsiders alike. Through utopian projects and speculative proposals, the exhibition at the Design Museum in Copenhagen attempts to provide an answer by hypothesising possible directions of development in the social field, in the evolution of our sense of community, and in the management of our environmental resources.

After the 2017 exhibition on the relationship between human and machine, the Vitra Design Museum revisits the subject by presenting us with the increasingly rapid and high-performance advances and consequences of robotics in our lives. The exhibition covers the imagery in pop and sci-fi culture linked to the myth of robots, and then looks at applications in the work chain and the increasingly intimate relationship that links humans to these new prostheses in their daily lives.

The archives of the Fondazione Castiglioni are an inexhaustible mine of ever-changing insights and materials. In this new temporary exhibition, the focus is on a narrow but particularly emblematic time period - 1962. One project above all, Arco, inspired the name of the exhibition, reminding us of the reason for the unexpected hole in the marble block that forms the base of the famous lamp.

The theme of forecasting also returns in this exhibition at the Design Museum in Helsinki. In this case, the speculative analysis is entrusted to seven designers and artists who, using weak and strong signals emanating from a possible future as cues, refine their vision to teach us how we might live at work, at home, in our relationship with nature and the city, in our decision-making practices and in the metaverse.

Again at the Design Museum Helsinki, an exhibition retraces the joint work of Antti and Vuokko Nurmesniemi, one of the most famous couples in Scandinavian design, known for their extensive and inventive production in the field of product and textile design. This is an opportunity to discover work devoted to good design carried out thanks to the complicity between two distinct yet complementary visions.

The first museum in the world to have acquired the @ in its collection, MoMA is constantly focusing on the digital, which is reflected in this new exhibition dedicated to all those new interfaces, from video call apps to video games, that have become a constant presence in our daily lives.

This exhibition curated by Jonathan Olivares and Alexis Georgacopoulos, Director of ECAL, questions the meaning of teaching a discipline - design - which is multi-faceted and ever-changing, by suggesting to us, through the twenty works selected, that the answer cannot be univocal, and that it must on the contrary necessarily be confronted with the personal vocation and research of each student.