Design and Fashion

Lifebelts turn into bottle coolers, brushes into lampshades - the exhibition somewhat different. Contemporary Design and the Power of Convention, presented by the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen e.V. (ifa) and curator Volker Albus, shows design that diverges from the conventional. The great diversity of designs is illustrated by 106 different items and a total of 148 objects by 67 individual designers and studios, 47 of them based in Germany and 20 in other European countries. The exhibition discusses the objects in terms of function, materials, construction and content.

The bookshelf, the Persian rug, the easy chair: these generic terms trigger associations in everyone. This is why designers deliberately subvert their general, conventional understanding to reveal their absurdity. The designs do not only provoke astonishment, but challenge one to reflect on general expectations, codes of behaviour as well as the context of firmly established notions, and to review traditional fixations. For it is these 'breaks with the power of convention' that document the far-reaching socio-cultural changes which we currently witness in all areas of our daily lives and which manifest themselves in key phenomena such as mobility, migration, changing nutritional habits and many more.

The exhibition illustrates the international aspect of this discourse on contemporary design in two respects. Firstly, it complements the works of the 47 German designers and design partnerships with examples by 20 foreign designers from Denmark, France, Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Austria, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland and Spain. Secondly, ifa invites every institution wishing to host the exhibition to add objects by designers from its own country who have approached 'conventional' design tasks in a somewhat different way.