The Taking a Stance exhibition in Shenzhen, China presents eight critical attitudes in Chinese and Dutch architecture and design and runs until 1 August 2010.
Centred around the them of autonomy, the exhibition features works by Irma Boom, Ma Ke, Alexander van Slobbe, Ai Weiwei, Me We, Rem Koolhaas, Urbanus and Hella Jongerius. It explores how designers are breaking down the standardised conventions within their disciplines and how they reformulate these constraints in a creative way.
The exhibition is an exploration of the contentious spaces in which designers and artists operate: mass production versus traditional techniques; personal work versus commissioned work; tradition versus innovation and globalisation versus the need for identity.
One of the eight designers, Hella Jongerius designed a cupboard for Taking a Stance. The cupboard gives a representative overview of her work in both craft and industry. There are 45 vases of different colours in the cupboard and samples of the industrial textiles for Mahara. Photographs of products from the past 20 years are also part of the exhibition, pinned onto cork panels. The compartments in the cupboard can be turned around to expose different layers and concepts of Jongerius’s work while changing the surface of the cupboard.
The exhibition is curated by Linda Vlassenrood and Suzanne Mulder who are both affiliated to the Netherlands Architecture Institute.
