Event Calendar
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Resolving the vital role of packaging with its impact on our world is at the heart of this important new exhibition at London's Museum of Brands, Packaging and Advertising. Drawing on the museum's extensive collection, the exhibition explains the importance of packaging, how it has developed over the years, the serious challenges it now presents, and how manufacturers, retailers and designers are working together to adopt a more environmentally friendly approach.
Death is omnipresent in the media and in our leisure distractions. Yet we avoid direct contact with those lifeless corpses which confront us with our own fragility. Our diversionary tactics vary: over-elaborate ritualisation or, on the contrary, an aseptic and depersonalised relationship. The funerary urn, an object made to preserve the deceased ashes and dissimulating them in a neutral container, belongs to these tactics. Its aesthetics are usually solemn if not morbid. How to remediate this?
This installation of twenty-three chairs is selected from an important group given to the Museum in 2007 by Jeanne Rymer, a retired professor and head of the Interior Design Program at the University of Delaware.
As modernism took hold in the early years of the twentieth century, designers began to view ornament as unnecessary and even morally offensive to modern industrial production. Increasingly they shunned decoration in favor of rational, austere designs that were devoid of extraneous embellishment. Despite their criticism, however, ornament was never entirely exorcised from consumer culture, and by the late 1950s designers were returning to an informed discussion about ornament and its symbolic value.
At a time of heightened interest in works of so-called 'design art', made in small editions for the collector's market, Telling Tales will feature work by a generation of internationally regarded designers. The exhibition will focus on work by designers who explore the narrative potential of objects, connecting the past with the present. 
For several years, the evidence has been there to see: nature is coming back in force in society's discussions as much as in the imagination of contemporary creators. What with the call for collective responsibility to safeguard it and the multiplication of urban substitutes, nature seems omnipresent, whereas we have never been so distanced from it. The central subject of very pragmatic challenges, its original inspirational power is effecting a transformation and confronting mankind with the question of its use. Contemporary creation has made itself into an eloquent interpreter of this and is delineating ...
Jan Kaplický, who died earlier this year, was the Czech architect responsible for some of the most remarkable buildings that Britain has ever seen.
Fabrica
This installation, drawn from the Museum’s permanent collection, brings together objects employed in the service and consumption of alcoholic beverages.
The Museum at 
Over the last fifty years, David Goldblatt has documented the complexities and contradictions of South African society. His photographs capture the social and moral value systems that governed the tumultuous history of his country’s segregationist policies and continue to influence its changing political landscape. Goldblatt began photographing professionally in the early 1960s, focusing on the effects of the National Party’s legislation of apartheid.
Asked why she didn’t photograph mountains or landscapes, Herlinde Koelbl once replied: “People are unpredictable.” Perhaps this statement gives an indication of what makes the work of this great German art photographer so special. She wants to grasp people, understand them, find out something about how they live, what they choose to surround themselves with, how they would like to appear and what they really are, what elates them and what casts them down. Her images are intense experiences because they are the product of a genuine interest in and curiosity about her fellow human beings, and her respect for the lives of others is always in evidence.
Ninety years ago, Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus in Weimar. It existed for only 14 years, but it became the most important school of modernity. With Josef Albers, Herbert Bayer, Marcel Breuer, Lyonel Feininger, Johannes Itten, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Gerhard Marcks, Adolf Meyer, Georg Muche, László Moholy-Nagy, Hinnerk Scheper, Oskar Schlemmer, Joost Schmidt, Lothar Schreyer and Gunta Stölzl, a faculty with an international reputation worked under the direction of Walter Gropius (1919-1928), Hannes Meyer (1928-1930) and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1930-1933) at the Bauhaus.
Experience the “Soundsuits” of Chicago-based artist and former Alvin Ailey dancer Nick Cave—multi-layered mixed-media, wearable sculptures named for the sounds made when worn. Reminiscent of African and religious ceremonial costumes as well as high fashion, they are made using scavenged ordinary materials—fabrics, beads, sequins, old bottle caps, rusted iron sticks, twigs, leaves and hair—that Cave re-contextualizes into visionary masterpieces.
Krome Gallery
Among the most influential designers of our time, Ron Arad (Israeli, b. 1951) stands out for his daredevil curiosity about technology and materials and for the versatile nature of his work. Trained at the Jerusalem Academy of Art and at London's Architectural Association, Arad has produced an outstanding array of innovative objects over the past twenty-five years, from almost unlimited series of objects to carbon fiber armchairs and polyurethane bottle racks.
This display celebrates the 80th anniversary of Faber and Faber, one of the great remaining independent publishing houses in London. It was born in 1929 out of Faber & Gwyer, which had been founded in 1925 by Geoffrey Faber, T.S. Eliot and Richard de la Mare.
In the context of the State of Rhineland-Palatinate’s summer culture program Kunsthalle Mainz is featuring the first comprehensive solo show by Scottish artist David Shrigley (born 1968) in Germany. The artist, who lives in Glasgow, is known above all for his comic-like drawings; many of them are included in a series of publications but also in artist and postcard books. 
Main exhibition. How will future designers work, and how does Danish design address global issues such as sustainability, new technology and consumption? The exhibition it’s a small world challenges the Danish design tradition and explores future design practices in a global perspective.
School of Visual Arts 
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