EXPO: In Czech Pavilion began the Czech Design Weeks
Shanghai, 8/8/2010
Shanghai, August the8th 2010: Weeks of Czech Design have been festively opened today by starting the exhibition „Miracles Archive“ in the Czech Pavilion at EXPO. These weeks will last till the end of August and have two main events: Exhibition of ten leading designers and artists in the Multimedia Hall of the Czech Pavilion (8 August -31 August 2010) and Fashion Week (20 August – 25 August 2010), which will feature a runway show (18 August 2010, Bund 18) of five leading Czech fashion designers, and an installation of original designs at the same prestigious address: Bund 18. All designs and fashion collections have been created especially for this project.
In the MultiMedia Hall of the Czech pavilion the Pavilion Director Miloslava Kumbárová and Events Manager Martina Hončíková together with curators Jana Zielinski and Jiří Macek (Designblok Prague) and architect of the exhibition Jan Němeček (Olgoj Chorgoj) revealed ten objects installed in a stylized landscape under a glass sketch of a tree designed by Olgoj Chorchoj.
The exhibition will also feature a film by the director Tomáš Luňák, in which the world of intangible illusion meets with specific situations in a real landscape.
The designers of the objects created for the exhibitions are:
Liběna Rochová: Flight - paper
Olgoj Chorchoj: Childhood - wood
Eva Eisler: Light and space - glass/corian
René Šulc: Time - wood
Anna Kozová: Silence – stone/metal/corian
Hana Zárubová: Image – nanotechnology/PE fibre
Rony Plesl: Soil – blown and cut glass
Daniel Piršč: Movement - porcelain
Sailm Issa: Rain - photography
Hippos Design: Infinity – blown glass
Commentary from the authors of the Archive of Miracles exhibition, Jana Zielinski and Jiří Macek, on the original idea:
“We live in an environment we created ourselves for a happier life. In towns and in villages. The moments we regard as happy are, however, independent of these places; they are the sum of our subconscious desires and dreams. With many of these, we no longer realize that they have become a part of our lives, infusing moments when we experience excitement and joy. To showcase the unique position of Czech design in today’s world, its capacity to communicate original stories and revolutionary ideological and technical solutions of specific situations, we have come back to the beginning of their work and invited a select group of ten authors, advocates of different approaches, to design an object – as a purely personal response to selected abstract themes of desires, dreams, or personal moments of happiness. Industrial designers, fashion designers, architects and a photographer explore, each though their own prism and employing different techniques, concepts such as silence, light, time, movement, childhood, flight, land, infinity, image and memory. The result of their work is not products intended for serial production, or sculptures, but personal records translated into everyday objects, in which they tried to capture the miracle of existence, and maybe help us in perceiving the world.”
design: Liběna Rochová,
theme: Flight
Bird,
paper object,
production: Studio Činčera
Fashion designer Liběna Rochová uses paper as one of her media; she crumples it, tears it up, wears it. Her most seminal fashion designs were mainly made of paper which, rather than suiting, captured emotion and desire.
How will she interpret ordinary paper darts, and which shape will she give to the desire to take off?
design: Olgoj Chorchoj,
theme: Childhood
Chair,
Solid wood and moulded plywood,
Production: Ton
Olgoj Chrochoj chose a chair to interpret the theme, possibly one which is the most frequent and at the same time the hardest to conquer. The designer chose plywood, moulded to form in a factory where the legendary Thonet No. 14 was born, in Ton Bystřice as it is called today. The result is a hybrid in shape and technology, which uses various elements from other already existing products in the factory; a thing which is more of a recliner than a chair, and comes in a children’s’ version, too – children, after all, want to be grown up, and grown-ups want to be children.
Our optics changes as we grow and become adults. Things look different when you are five, fifteen or forty – and not just optically, as we see the objects from other angles when children or adults, but also philosophically.
design: EvaEisler
theme: Light and Space
Glass, corian,
Eva Eisler, head of the studio Concept – Object – Meaning at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague, Conceptual Art, elevated the theme of a light to the level of study in architecture.
When we learned to start a fire, we entered the world of darkness. With the arrival of electricity, we conquered the darkness. For us, light is mainly the sunlight and shadow. Cubes represent the walls of the city, higher here, lower here, a labyrinth of shadows and illuminated areas. White is white, but also grey, black – all is in the hands of light. Cubes can be shelves for petty objects, but they are more of a city in which we are searching for ourselves.
design: René Šulc,
theme: Time
Coelacanth, bench,
wood - birch, PUR vanish
production: author in collaboration with Truhlářství Ing. Florián
René Šulc is not only a designer, but also a keen fisherman and classical music aficionado. “Whenever I have time to go fishing and I sit down by a river or a lake, I stop and ponder the relativity of the passage of time. As if time there passed more slowly, or stopped and ceased to be,” he says. To express Time, René Šulc designed a bench, through which he transposed his own “non-existence” in time from the river bank to the city where time passes significantly faster. The bench was given the symbolic archetypal form of a fish, later abstracted in a simple oval shape – the symbol of the time cycle. The bench was then ground to shape by the designer himself.
When you put a bench by a river, it will start to change by the effect of wind, sun, rain and time. The wood of the bench continues to be living and dying.
design: AnnaKozová
theme: Silence
air humidifier,
corian,
Anna Kozová, the New Talent of the Year at the Czech Grand Design 2008 Awards, has a baby son Alfred, so she cherishes the rare moments of peace and quiet. What symbolizes them? A look out of a window, into the landscape, moments when you can just watch, observe. Perhaps that is why Anna expressed silence as a landscape which behaves like its real vision. A machine produces fog over the landscape, from which water rains over a valley, creating a lake which, when the fog machine stops, gradually soaks into the ground, only to reappear later as fog over the valley and rain. A miniature circulation of water in nature, as if we already learned to control the weather and nature.
design: HanaZárubová
theme: Image
Decoration with a removable down jacket
We invited the fashion designer Hana Zárubová to design, instead of clothes, a piece of art, an image which she could herself watch for a long time. She designed an embroidered fibre image which looks like an Indian demon trap, but is in fact a circular model of a down jacket. An image that can be taken off the wall any time, and worn outside when you go to catch your real dreams.
They say we live in a visual era. Despite all the information that bombards us from all directions, we often only remember strong images and emotions connected with them. In these images, glances, artists often find future shapes, their inspiration.
design: Rony Plesl,
theme: Soil
Pail,
blown and cut glass, stainless steel
production: Ajeto Czech Glass Craft
Rony Plesl designs highly artistic original glass vases and top-class designer beverage serving glass. We invited him to design a water vessel in which his both creative planes would meet with the result of paying homage to water. He designed a pail. When you look at it, it is always full of bubbles, life and air, whose principal function we originally forgot. A large, pathetic monument to large things – this is this pail. Maybe a pail is generally the best shaped vessel designed by man. You can do so many things with it.
What would we be without water, plants, what would be soil without water. We wanted to bring to the Archive of Miracles a monument to growth, a process which will express our respect to soil and water.
design: Daniel Piršč,
theme: Movement
Tiger,
design object,
porcelain
production: Pirsc Porcelain
Porcelain and movement is not the most logical combination of all, but neither is movement and stone and when you see Baroque statues, you cannot help to see movement in them.
Daniel designed a running tiger, almost lost in a storm – as if the animal’s contours were blurred. To achieve this effect, he brought forward the limits of what one can do with porcelain. He added a substance of inferior quality to the porcelain – one which is not affected by baking in the oven and its particles will subsequently flush out. Swimming the tigers in a river thus became a part of the whole production process as the current is employed to shape the tigers’ contours. The result is similar to sea shells washed out of the sea, or limestone sculptures exposed to the elements for centuries. Daniel mastered this process and his tigers roam the country, their contours becoming a blur in a storm.
photo: Salim Issa
theme: Rain
rain,
photography,
Photographer Salim Issa often takes photographs of landscape and likes large format images and human faces. When presented with the brief to photograph rain, it was as if both of these passions came into one. The face became the landscape and an Indian dances in the morning mist.
Rain always brings on strong emotions. It diffuses the view of the landscape which appears to disappear, draws pictures on the water surface and its sound triggers our dreaming. With rain, it is as if we dig deeper into our subconsciousness.
design: Hippos design,
theme: Infinity
“The universe, to us, is the most beautiful archive of miracles, together with its magical space and weightlessness.”
Cosmic I – IV, collection of vases,
soda-potassium glass,
production: Moravské sklárny Květná pro Křehký
Hippos design do architecture as well as design. Their scope is expansive –designing bicycles, seats, lights, houses, exhibitions, but they have never designed anything in glass. A collection of four vases takes inspiration from the shape of amphora and spacesuit; the shapes merge in an exploration and discovery of the relationship between the space of the vase and the life of a flower. Their intersection creates an unexpected new world, not unlike the universe which, for Radim Babák and Ondřej Tobola who together are Hippos design, is the biggest miracle of all. Viewed from different angles the size and colour of the flower changes, as does the stem; the water only contributes to these small miracles. Like explorers, you see a different flower each time.
What do flowers see from their spacesuit?
Images for the catalogue by Salim Issa.
Concept authors: Jana Zielinski, Jiří Macek, Michal Froněk, Jan Němeček
Curators: Jana Zielinski, Jiří Macek (Designblok Praha)
Architecture: Michal Froněk and Jan Němeček (Olgoj Chorchoj)
Contact:
Marketing and Communication Manager
Jiří František Potužník
Mob.: 0086 135 017 64419
E-mail: potuznik@czexpo.comimage003
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