Our Polite Society
exhibition
As part of our exhibition at HBKsaar Gallery in Saarbrücken, Germany, we made a work emphasizing the problem of presenting graphic design work in the context of a gallery. In such a setting the work loses its functionality and to a certain extent represents itself: when the work is hung on the wall in order to be ‘viewed’ and not to be ‘used’ it turns into a representation of an idea rather than a functional object. Trying to not fall into this trap we focused on the aspect of (re-)presentation of our work in general. In collaboration with artist-photographer Paulien Barbas we showed a series of screen-printed sheets (70 x 100 cm) that functioned as backgrounds in a series of photographs documenting work for our website. On an opposite wall we showed this series of documentation photographs as c-prints in 1:1 scale depending on the object shown on the photograph – the representation of a poster would be bigger in size than the representation of a business card. A third part of the exhibition was a (conventional) display of original works on walls and tables. In the interaction of these 3 elements (screen-prints, c-prints, originals) we tried to activate the above mentioned problem within the presentation itself. Photos by Paulien Barbas.