MUDAM Musee d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean Luxembourg
25 May -24 september 2007
Curators: Alexandra Midal and Björn Dahlström
Exhibition Design: Mathieu Lehanneur
With works by Aérolande, Alvar Aalto, Eerio Aarnio, Ant Farm, Archigram, Egmont Arens, Matthew Barney, Norman Bel Geddes, Claude Bellegarde, Arthur Bracegirdle, Marcel Breuer, Clifford Brook Stevens, R. Buckminster Fuller, Maurice Calka, Alain Carré, Casati & Ponzio, Achille & Pier Giacomo Castiglioni, Hussein Chalayan, Philippe Charbonneaux, Gino Colombini, Joe Colombo, Coop Himmelblau, André Courrèges, François Dallegret, Stephan Dupuis for David Cronenberg, Henry Dreyfuss & Walter Teague, Dunne & Raby, Charles & Ray Eames, ECAL / École Cantonale d’Art de Lausanne, Jean-Claude Forest, Jean-Claude Forest & Serge Gainsbourg, General Idea, Hugo Gernsback, Peter Ghyczy, Paul Granjon, Eileen Gray, Fergus Greer, Konstantin Grcic & Nitzan Cohen, Haus-Rucker-Co., Herzog & de Meuron, Kawashima Hideaki, Edward C. Hoffman, Hans Hollein, Arne Jacobsen, Frederick Kiesler, Shiro Kuramata, Yonel Lebovici, Mathieu Lehanneur, Raymond Loewy, Lot-Ek, M/M, Anthony Malden, John McCracken, :mentalKLINIK, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Jean-Luc Moerman, Dario Montagni / Sergio Berrizzi / Cesare Butte, Mariko Mori, Gianni Motti, Olivier Mourgue, George Nelson, Marc Newson, Nutting Associates Inc., Onyx, Shoji Otomo, Verner Panton, Walter Pichler, Danielle Quarante, Quasar Kahn, Paco Rabanne, Gerrit R. Rietveld, R&SIE, Denis Santachiara, Richard Sapper & Marco Zanuso, De Pas / d’Urbino / Lomazzi / Scolari, Chen Shaoxiong, Yinka Shonibare, Ettore Sottsass, Superstudio, Matti Suuronen, Roger Tallon, Noam Toran & Nicholas Williamson, Noam Toran & Wilfrid Wood, Kyoichi Tzusuki, Patrick Veillet, Jean-Pierre Vitrac
About the exhibition: “Tomorrow now – when design meets science fiction” is the first exhibition devoted to the relationship between design and science fiction, elements that have come together several times during the course of the 20th century. Although a primordial source of inspiration for the cinema, the visual arts and architecture, science fiction’s closest links are, however, to design. Three periods stand out from these encounters. The first is linked to anticipation and innovation in the case of Hugo Gernsback who in 1929 invented the term “science fiction” and published cheap magazines that popularised the subject. There was also the Universal Exhibition in New York in 1939 in which designers who traditionally envisaged the production of industrial objects seized on that of private, public and urban spaces, of which the Futurama is incontestably the most surprising and premonitory example. Science fiction and design worked together to show how technology can be put to the service of mankind. The second conjunction between science fiction and design takes on impressive proportions in the post-war period when the two universes became the subject of an energy and a jubilation combined with the dream of space conquest in the process of being made concrete. The eventual discovery of new intergalactic territories which is counterbalanced by the stress placed on interior worlds, subjugates designers. They were inspired by the imaginary aspect of science fiction, creating a myriad of capsule-like forms and borrowing from it the fictional mode which, when diverted, validates technology or denounces it. Finally, along with investigations based on a conception of linear time, we find a third bridge between design and science fiction which, this time, offers a vertical temporal axis. This challenge to Cartesian logic rests on the postulate of the existence of a fourth dimension, that of time, which, when associated with the other three dimensions, becomes a gateway to a parallel world. Breaches in space-time may be found through these “wormholes”, teleportation doors and other black holes. Neither anticipation nor prediction nor retro-future, these parallel worlds are juxtaposed with present reality.
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Remember, time is perceived fully when it is ‘frozen’
Frozen45˝
:mentalKLINIK, yasemin baydar, birol demir
45 minutes time-freezer
Frozen45˝ is tomorrow’s treatment envisioned by :mentalKLİNİK for freezing the time of the skin
a unisex treatment by :mentalKLİNİK to apply at MUDAM to freeze the time of and trap your face in time as a sculpture.
Both skin and time are problems of lines. Skin has its own time. :mentalKLİNİK recommends you to ‘freeze’ the time today before your skin gets traces of tomorrow. :mentalKLİNİK has developed a special treatment , which allows you to take with you your face of today into the anticipated future. Developed particularly for this facial treatment, the-state-of-the-art time-freezing product contains extracts of the ‘frozen’ time manufactured biotechnologically for your skin. When applied onto your skin, this time-preventive and refreshing treatment activates the sense of time within the pore of your skin.
Frozen45” by :mentalKLİNİK forecasts how people will shape their own bodies, becoming both the ultimate consumer and the item consumed in the coming age of “Biot”s - entities which are both object and person, both the shaper and the thing shaped -. The cosmetics industry already uses the methods and the language of a “Biot” technosociety. Frozen45” is an envisioned treatment of tomorrow freezing the time of the skin. Invisible in its application, it attains its visibility in the absorption process by the Biot transformation. The visitors getting the in-museum Frozen45” treatment, allow their bodies to participate in the economy of the museum. Their faces become invisible sculptures in the museum forever, also forecasting how when the boundary between objects and humans disappear, museums might exhibit “Biot”s.
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To Freeze the Time
Björn Dahlström
The curator of ‘Tomorrow Now'
Frozen 45” by :mentalKLINIK transports us into an era yet to come, the Biot technosociety where we can model our own bodies becoming the actor and the subject simultaneously. Indiscernible in its application, Frozen 45” is a treatment of the future whose effects are discerned through the Biot transformation process and it offers to fix the transformation of the skin. The faces of the visitors become then an invisible sculpture disclosing the way the museums may exhibit the Biot when the frontiers betweens humans and objects no longer exist.
This is the principle of this miraculous product, a cosmetic, regulator of time and portrait sculptor, conceived by :mentalKLINIK and praised by the mini guide of Tomorrow Now, when design meets science fiction exposition for which Frozen 45” has been imagined. The public is invited to experiment it at Mudam, Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg until 25th of September 2007.
It is around the theme of pharmacopoeia that :mentalKLINIK takes advantage of the secular sweaty dream of the humanity: to master the time and its effects. Psycho-pharmacy is largely addressed in the exposition, notably with the presentation of Hans Hollein’s architecture pill, a representative project of homeostasis at the service of modified environments. A simple colored pill in a transparent wrapping, «control kit of non-physical environment» to quote the expression of its author, that takes responsibility - with irony- for creating a sane equilibrium between the environment and its occupant. With Frozen 45” the medication no longer works orally but through spraying onto the face, the solution effects in priority the body and no longer the spirit immediately. The subject receives the treatment leaning against a conical octagonal stupa which looks like a trans-door and which becomes a treatment cabin. Also a thermo-sensitive, self-sticking pastille applied again onto the skin, controls the effects of the medication on the patient during 45 minutes, the amount of time required to visit the Tomorrow Now exhibition, as indicated by the product. All is at the cost of 3 €.
Is Frozen 45” a placebo? What matters is the predisposition of the patient- A Dorian Gray feeble for three quarters of an hour-in the naive follow up of the ceremony imagined by the Turkish Collective which takes the visitor into pleasured anxiety. What is the validity of the treatment and its potential danger? Is the museum still today one of the last places where such experiments can be conducted? One is tempted to believe that it is the case, abandoned to the treatments of the mediators of the museum who apply the process literally, activating humor and conviviality, the relational esthetic as defined by Nicolas Bourriaud, or the esthetic of communication as initiated by Fred Forest in the 80s which queries the problematics attached to our perception of time and space, and even more here, to our relation to art as model of simulation against powers- the salesman of eternal youth, their industrial cosmetics and their possible placebo effect which may be even nocebo.
As it is exemplified in their global projects GAME, COPY, SELF…, that is where :mentalKLINIK is situated, beyond the merchants of systems and institutions of art in a world where everything happens as if art evades the traditional modes of diffusion and takes possession of everything.
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:mentalKLİNİK
ıhlamur yolu, opera palas apartmanı no: 33/35 d.6 topagacı/nişantaşı_istanbul_turkey
mental@mentalklinik.com
http://www.mentalklinik.com/
http://www.documentalklinik.com/
