If design is shaping our collective future, what version of the future is being modelled? And, more importantly, is it the future we desire? These questions are vital to this year’s Melbourne Design Week, which considers how design impacts our our future in terms of aesthetics, economics, technology, culture and environment.
Now in its third year, the week brings together designers, artists, academics, writers and more to consider the 2019 theme: design experiments.
Within this curatorial premise lie sub-themes, with central questions relating to waste and urban pollution, including oceanic pollution and recyclability. As Ewan McEoin, senior curator of contemporary design and architecture at NGV, says, “One highlight is a symposium called Toxic City which will bring together key thinkers around urban pollution and climate change, which includes leading climate change journalist from The New York Times, Somini Sengupta, and Daan Roosegaarde, the Dutch environmental artist.”
The week features further international speakers including Erieta Attali, an Israeli architectural photographer, and Dan Pearson, a leading UK plant designer. Yet there is a strong local focus, with consideration of how design impacts affordable housing, ageing in Australia, zero-waste buildings, gender diversity and Melburnians’ connection to the Yarra River. Meanwhile the exhibition program includes Welcome to Wasteland, where designers create new work addressing waste issues (think plates made of lettuce), and a show at Sophie Gannon Gallery which, curated by design academic Guy Keulemans, looks at supply chains and where materials originate.
Above all, the week aims to be generative: to create outcomes and speculations, rather than simply reflecting what has come before.
Melbourne Design Week 2019
Various locations
14 March—24 March
This article was originally published in the March/April print edition of Art Guide Australia.
In a new collaborative exhibition at PS Art Space, in partnership with Cool Change Contemporary, five artists with process-lead practices contemplate material ethics through actively engaging in slowness and reuse.
Isaac Julien’s 2022 video work Once Again…(Statues Never Die) exposes the unseen emotional registers inherent to the struggle for colonial repatriation by mapping the places where poetics and politics intersect.
A new exhibition at the Australian National Capital Artists Inc (ANCA) asks 12 artists—including Dan Powers, S.A.Adair, Emma Beer and Lisa Sammut—to explore scale: from the miniature to the monumental.
Stepping into Sarah Contos’s sprawling home studio in Kyle Bay, in southern Sydney, feels like a step inside the artist’s inventive and inquisitive brain—apt given that Contos’s upcoming show at UNSW Galleries, Eye Lash Horizon, explores aspects of what makes us human.
In a new exhibition at Australian Galleries, Kyoko Imazu’s intricate papercuts show worlds in miniature—Some of works are only 15 centimetres tall, yet their detail is meticulous.
Two exhibitions in Sydney are showcasing interdisciplinary research on climate change communicated in artistic ways.
