BDW DIZAJNPARK EXHIBITIONS – Part II

TALK OF THE TOWN

BDW DizajnPark exhibitions, powered by Gorenje, part of Belgrade Design Week 2014, were the talk of the town last month, when a myriad of visitors from Belgrade, and around the world occupied the old Staklopan factory from October7th to 12th, to see the displays by some of the world’s and Serbian greatest designers.
Take a look at some of the highlights!

“Juxtaposition”, by Nicolas le Moigne, CH

With the support from the Swiss Arts Council Prohelvetia, we saw the exhibition named “Juxtaposition” by Nicolas le Moigne, who designs objects made of polystyrene, cardboard, plastic, foam and wood. At the Belgrade Design Week 2014 he presented the selection of volumes which, in further production process become real objects. In collaboration with the Swiss company Eternit, Nicolas produced Ecal, a modern, 100% recyclable fiber cement garden stool which he showed at DizajnPark. The ‘slip stools’ are molded and left in the rough form emphasizing the industrial material of which they are made. The ‘flash’ (excess material which is left when two molded parts are attached together) which is normally removed in the production process, is left as an aesthetic detail.

 

Restons-Serieux, by Gavrilo Božović, CH

With the support from Prohelvetia, Swiss agency Restons-Serieux also showed its latest experimental work. With these pieces Gavrilo Božović showed some of the new directions the agency is exploring, and also demonstrated the new fields design can explore together with new technologies. One of his favorite projects, presented in Belgrade is “Jalousie”. It is a photograph, printed on paper which burns at the exact points where the users look at it. The destruction is physical and final, therefore only the first visitors were able to see the whole picture. The content is not removed at random: the areas that get destroyed are the ones that the visitors themselves consider the most important or interesting. This raises many questions of modesty or censorship, the picture hiding itself, or being hidden, from the visitors’ gaze. In addition, the partly destroyed picture we obtain at the end becomes a work in itself, in whose creation the visitors participated. It is a picture that carries as scars the testimony of the focused interest of the public.

Table T, by Irena Kilibarda, RS

At Belgrade Design Week 2014 Irena Kilibarda’s showed her famous Table T – a hand-made space-age piece of outdoor furniture that lights up from within. What makes it so unique is that it is made from the latest generation of the composite material Corian, produced by the company Dupont, and it has a futurist look. Corian is a solid, impermeable material, extremely durable and resistant, inert, nontoxic, semi-transparent, easy to maintain and use for creating tridimensional forms, and which can also be carved as wood. If a physical damage does occur, Corian can be restored with simple polishing. All these qualities inspired Irena Kilibarda to use Corian as the basic material to produce her “Table T”, and illuminate it with LED lights.

“The Obsidian project and Dandelight”, by Studio Drift, NL

Dutch Studio Drift presented at the Belgrade Design Week 2014 the exhibition “The Obsidian project and Dandelight”, with the support from the foundation Creative Industries Fund NL. With this exhibition, members of Studio Drift, Ralph Nauta and Lonneke Gordijn, wanted to emphasize an almost alchemical, ‘something from nothing’characteristic of synthetic obsidian, and to highlight a dialogue about the ethical responsibility of creating solutions for worldwide problems. Their philosophy is based on creating a dialogue between opposites, nature with technology, knowledge and intuition, science fiction and nature. Light is a key element in their work, but they always treat it as a part of art, rather than functional means of illumination. Maybe that is why BDW’s Art Director, Biljana Bilakovic, voted for this exhibition as the best one.

“Phantasm on Wheels”, by Nikola Kolja Božović, RS

At Belgrade Design Week 2014, Nikola Kolja Božović presented his exhibition “Phantasm on Wheels”, which is a result of his artistic research on various aspects of the car as a carrier of cultural and social meanings. In addition to objects created by transformation of original car parts, he uses a form of artistic expression through spatial installation by placing his works in correlation with the gallery space conceived as a virtual urban landscape, which he“decorates” with images that are not designed as autonomous objects of artistic expression, but as a supporting visual tool for artistic recapitulation of “auto-mobile“ ideas that the artist used to build a new fictional world of personal phantasm.

“Imagine– the Wooden Bicycle”, by Dvoika, RS

At Belgrade Design Week we saw the exhibit of “Imagine – the Wooden Bicycle”by Studio DVOIKA. It is the latest model of a city bike designed and crafted by DVOIKA, it is extremely solid, yet elegant and sophisticated wooden bicycle designed to provide new experience of cycling as it runs smoothly and almost stealthy, allowing the rider to perceive the city in its full scale.