For Dutch Design Week 2016, which will be held from 22 – 30 October, Design Academy Eindhoven and the Van Abbemuseum are once again teaming up to create a joint exhibition: Broken White. Broken White will open two weeks before DDW starts, on Saturday 8 October. The exhibition will run until 6 November 2016, a week after DDW closes.
BROKEN WHITE
The blue tap is for cold water, red is for warm. Orange triggers a sense of excitement. And yellow is good for attracting attention in shop windows. Everyone relates to colours, often in highly emotional ways, but exactly how this works, we don’t know. With designers this leads to chromophobia, a fear of colour, which is repressed with conventions, fashions and styles. The digital revolution has turned the whole thing on its head. For centuries we viewed colour in terms of light hitting an object and reflecting off it in varying degrees. Total reflection results in white, complete absorption in black. But today’s ubiquitous screens are not light reflecting objects. They are objects that emit light themselves. The source of colour has changed, and with that, the way it manifests itself. While he was teaching at Design Academy Eindhoven, artist Mathieu Meijers developed a scheme that allows us to recalibrate our understanding of colour. Broken White is a concretisation of this scheme through works of art and design. On the one hand it contains light, reflecting objects that appeal to our higher emotions, define our identities and encourage a taxonomy – even to a dangerous degree sometimes. On the other hand there are objects in dark, absorbing colours which evoke feelings of emotional security, but also of fear and which represent earthly connectedness and intuition. The emergence of new techniques and materials has caused not only an increase in the different manifestations of colours, but also in the number of meanings colours can have. Broken White demonstrates how designers and artists are dealing with this and how they are part of creating these meanings.
AN ONGOING DIALOGUE
Broken White is the fourth exhibition to spring from the collaboration between Design Academy Eindhoven and the Van Abbemuseum. In 2013, Self Unself studied the personal motives and unselfish attitude of a new generation of designers. Sense Nonsense, in 2014, showed both the innovative strengths and the irrational powers of design. And 2015’s Thing Nothing was a study into the meaning, value, and future of things. Together, these exhibitions formed a trilogy on new positions in design.
In a series of “Invitations to the Conversation” top institutes and individuals – experts in their own professional field – are asked to develop new projects at the Van Abbemuseum. These generate new knowledge and expertise that will trigger further collaborations and reinforce the links between design, art and society.
More info: www.vanabbe.nl