Ordinary or extraordinary?
Polish designers present their new projects at Vienna Design Week
This is the next installment of the JUST a THING exhibition – after September’s presentation at the Maison&Objet international trade fair in Paris in October, the projects of Polish designers will be presented at Vienna Design Days . Austrian audiences will see 10 new works by 10 young Polish designers and design groups: Aze design, Beton, Pawel Grobelny, Krystian Kwiecinski, Lapolka, Malafor, Bartosz Mucha, Piotr Stolarski, Arek Wolski and Lukasz Wysoczynski.
The exhibition is curated by Agnieszka Jacobson Cielecka, an expert on Polish and global design and applied arts, and author of many design exhibitions. The organizers of the exhibition – the Adam Mickiewicz Institute and the Regional Museum in Stalowa Wola – successfully support and promote Polish design and designers abroad. The JUST A THING exhibition is the best example of this.
The subject of the JUST A THING exhibition is an ordinary object, seemingly boring and unattractive. However, such a seemingly trivial topic unleashed huge amounts of creativity, inspired designers to unusual solutions. The curator of the exhibition set the designers the task of designing any object that would fit into a plywood box with standard dimensions of 75x75x75 cm. Thus, the only design constraint was the size of the box.
“I invited 10 designers to participate in the project. They received the conditions that the object had to meet and a grant from the Adam Mickiewicz Institute to make a prototype. They were also given the theme and dimensions of the box in which the made prototype was to fit. Such a restriction was based on practical considerations – 10 objects packed in unified boxes create a collection that is easy to transport and display. With the slogan “an ordinary thing”, each designer had to cope on his own”. – explains Agnieszka Jacobson Cielecka – “What does ‘ordinary thing’ mean? After all, every designer strives to create a thing that is surprising, unique, escapes definitions – “extraordinary”. Can an ordinary thing be extraordinary? It turns out that yes, even though the designers have mostly enclosed ordinary objects in their boxes: seats (Wolski, Malafor), tables (Wysoczynski and Grobelny), lamps (Kwiecinski and Stolarski), dishes (Lapolka).
However, Malafor’s inflatable armchair defies all habits regarding seating furniture: immaterial and unstructured, it nevertheless fulfills its function. Wolski’s stool is a provocation, borrowing the form from the human body although non-literal, it puts us in an awkward position. In addition to the mundane purpose of the furniture, Wysoczynski responds to another need: storage – not only of objects in drawers, also of crippled, damaged and incomplete objects, burdened with memories.
Lapolka, Aze design and Concrete respond to the inflicted subject emotionally. In Lapolka’s case, inflatable glasses, used for playing rather than drinking, become a play on words: the literal meaning of “blowing” and the customary “glass.” Aze design, proposing to look through portraits of the past, admits the need to imagine oneself in other roles and other times. Concrete draws attention, surprises, raises a smile, teases. What is the ‘ordinary thing’ in the Concrete project?”
Some of the authors of the works presented at the exhibition are mature, well-known artists in Europe, such as Malafor, Aze Design, Beton and Pawel Grobelny, while others like Krystian Kwiecinski and Lukasz Wysoczynski are just at the beginning of their journey. All of them are talented designers whose works amaze with imagination, passion and humor, provoke, make us think about the role of design in our lives, prove that we can get surprising answers to simple questions.
The projects presented at the JUST A THING exhibition are a commentary to a recent publication by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute in Warsaw entitled “Out of the Ordinary. Polish Designers of the 20th Century,” substantively edited by Prof. Czeslawa Frejlich, on Polish design of the 20th century. The book and the exhibition are thus an invitation to reflect on and discuss “ordinary and extraordinary” things, an attempt to search for a definition of “ordinariness” in design and to determine whether an object is a thing or something more….
Exhibition Just a Thing
September 30 – October 9, 2011, Vienna Design Week(www.viennadesignweek.at) Ausstellungszentrum Heiligenkreuzerhof, Eingan Schönlaterngasse 5 bzw. Grashofgasse 3, A-1090 Wien. The exhibition is open to the public daily from 10:00 am to 6:00 pm
The JUST A THING exhibition was organized by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute in Warsaw (www.iam.pl and www.culture.pl) and the Regional Museum in Stalowa Wola.
Curator of the exhibition
AGNIESZKA JACOBSON-CIELECKA – curator of many exhibitions and journalist, expert and popularizer of contemporary design in Poland and abroad. Since 2008 artistic director and curator of exhibitions at the Łódź Design Festival (www.lodzdesign.com). She cooperates with many cultural institutions in Poland and abroad, organizing exhibitions of Polish and international design, including: UNPOLISHED – YOUNG DESIGN FROM POLAND together with Paweł Grobelny (2009), NATURAL RESOURCES OF POLISH DESIGN (2009), POLSKA FOLK (2010), MATERIA PRIMA (2010), DZIECINADA (2010). He is also involved in the popularization of design and designers. From 2000 to 2007 she was editor-in-chief of the Polish edition of Elle Decoration. Graduate of the painting department of the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdansk.
Organizers
The Adam Mickiewicz Institute is a national cultural institution. The Institute’s activity is part of the strategy of promoting Poland abroad.
The Institute promotes Polish culture around the world and cooperates with other countries. It presents the heritage and contemporary achievements of Polish culture. It organizes the presentation of projects of foreign partners in the country. We have to our credit many major cultural events and equally ambitious plans. Behind us is the Polish Season in France, Germany, Russia, Israel and POLSKA! YEAR recently completed in the United Kingdom. As part of the projects completed so far, the Institute has presented more than 3,000 cultural events in 26 countries, watched by more than 20 million viewers. IAM’s websites on the Internet are visited by users from more than 120 countries around the world. The culture.pl nr portal is a multilingual information system on Polish culture created by the Institute. There one can find information about current events in Poland and abroad, as well as a lot of encyclopedic data, including profiles of outstanding Poles.
The Regional Museum in Stalowa Wola is a modern institution specializing in promoting contemporary design and organizing exhibitions at home and abroad.
The Museum draws inspiration from the tradition of the city of Stalowa Wola, which was built from scratch in the 1930s. Modernism and decorativeness of the art déco style are present in the architecture and urban planning, preserved interiors of some buildings, but also in the Museum’s collection: a collection of applied art maintained in the art déco style. The museum creates a platform for dialogue between modernist traditions and modern activities in contemporary culture. Design and design remains an important sphere not only of culture, but also of the economy, so the Museum is a continuator of the ideas from which Stalowa Wola grew. It promotes design and contemporary art by conducting extensive educational and exhibition activities.
The Museum is the organizer of a series of design exhibitions: UNPOLISHED, POLSKA FOLK, DZIECINADA – presented at industry events in London, Berlin, Paris, Milan and Venice, among others.
In addition, the Museum implements various educational programs, including the Art Déco Architecture Route, and the Accessible Museum – a program to adapt its activities for the disabled.
Joanna Łozińska, e-mail: Joanna.lozinska@prinfo.pl; Tel: +48 660 41 41 02
