Hasta La Ideas

Kuho Jung’s Second Skin garment at News from Nowhere: Chicago Laboratory, 2013. Installation view, Sullivan Galleries, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Except where noted, all images by the author for Core77.

The premise of Desert Island Discs, one of the BBC’s most popular radio programs, is a simple one: if you were sent away to live on a desert island, what would you bring with you? Guests are allowed to take a selection of music (which plays during the program), one book, and one luxury item with them. What makes the show delightful is not the mundane realities of its premise—after all, how would you play the music after the batteries run out?—but the thought process that comes with the assumption of lack.

News From Nowhere<, an ongoing exhibition at the Sullivan Galleries at the School of the Art Institute Chicago, takes this basic premise of lack and sets it in the context of design. Developed by Korean artists Moon Kyungwon and Jeon Joonho, News takes the form of a collaborative project in which designers, artists, poets, philosophers and others are invited to imagine a post-apocalyptic world, where humanity almost goes extinct and we must start over from the beginning. The title of the exhibition comes from the eponymous 1890 novel by William Morris, a British designer who imagined a future society in which all property is shared.

A screen still from Moon and Jeong’s El Fin del Mundo. Image by James Prinz.

Upon entering the exhibition, we are greeted by El Fin del Mundo, a two-channel installation developed by Moon and Jeon, depicting parallel narratives of a young woman in a totalitarian society and an artist developing work on the side. The woman is dressed with plain severity, as many apocalyptic scenarios like 1984 and The Matrix have imagined we will one day dress. She examines a set of Christmas lights without context, while on the lefthand panel we watch the artist install the lights.

takram design engineering’s hydrolemic system imagines organs that maximize our bodys efficiency in a world where water is scarce.

Toyo Ito’s Home-for All: Kamaishi Revival Project.

This focus on an object and the narrative behind it sets the stage for much of the exhibition. Moon and Jeon invited leading design thinkers like Toyo Ito, MVRDV and Yu Jin Gyu, amongst others, to participate in the exhibition. Toyo Ito imagined a reconstruction of a Japanese village devastated by the recent tsunami, with a recreation of village life and structures. Takram design engineering’s team assembled a series of metallic implants that would make the body more efficient in the face of rapidly-decreasing water availability.

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