Working across the fields of graphic design, fashion, music, and publishing, the design collective åbäke will introduce the workshop’s participants into various modalities through which an institution can express herself and produce an always shifting identity.
This workshop is free, but has limited attendance capacity.
This talk is part of the public programme of
The Making of an Institution.
BIOGRPAHY
50 to 70 words to fairly define 16 years of activities of a collective is truly chal- lenging. Short biographies predate the selfie but somehow follow similar rules of editing a version of oneself until we start to look very attractive indeed. We would start by saying that åbäke is a
Graphic and spatial design are constitutive forces in the process of institutional building. A series of workshops and presentations will explore how the institution identity is produced through visual languages and spatial articulations. The programme brings together various design practitioners who take an experimental, speculative, and critical approach to design expanding their practice in close collaboration with art institutions. Looking into the convergence between the languages of art and design, such a programme aims to challenge the understanding of design beyond its utilitarian role as service provider. It will explore how designers respond to an institutional brief, how they challenge and deconstruct it positioning design as a field of critical inquiry.
Bastian von Lehsten (Germany) is the co-founder of Novamondo Design together with Christian Schlimok. The design agency works in the fields of brand strategy, corporate design, and digital communications for several international art organizations including the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Austria, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, United States , the Staatsoper and the Leibniz Association in Berlin, Germany. He is teaching branding and corporate design at the Design Academy Berlin, Germany. His work has received numerous rewards, including the Red Dot Award and the iF Design Award. Since 2015, Novamondo collaborates closely with NTU CCA Singapore on communication collaterals for exhibitions, research, and residencies.
Christoph Knoth (Netherlands) is a graphic designer, teacher, web developer and researcher who focuses on digital typography and the Internet as a platform for experimenting with visual language. In 2012 he was a design researcher at the Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, Netherlands, with the project Computed Type which explores the historic and future possibilities of parametric typeface generation. Since 2011 he works together with Konrad Renner and he is currently a guest researcher at the Bauhaus University Weimar, Germany. He collaborated with various artists and art institutions and designed the websites of Casco — Office for Art, Design and Theory Utrecht, Netherlands, Schauspiel Stuttgart, Germany, and the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2015 amongst others.