The exhibition aimed to show the potential of design to reveal, critique, resist, mitigate (and, yes, sometimes exacerbate) extremes and the mechanisms that drive them
December 12, 2019 – October 24, 2020
The exhibition State of Extremes marked ten years since the opening of Design Museum Holon. In 2010, Design Museum Holon was inaugurated with The State of Things, an international exhibition that presented design as a landscape of objects. Ten years later, State of Extremes instead describes a condition – that of a world that has changed, and with it, design and design practice.
We live in a state of extremes. Extreme weather, as a result of climate change, is both scorching and inundating the planet with record temperatures, unprecedented wildfires and ever more frequent and severe droughts, storms and floods. Meanwhile, extreme ideologies and political positions are being amplified by the media’s news cycles and the echo chamber of the Internet, further polarizing societies already inflamed by extreme, and growing, inequality and resentments. Extremes breed more extremes, creating self-reinforcing cycles of pushback and backlash, and fueling spiraling feedback loops of increasing intensity.
Moreover, science, technology, and the human imagination are opening new possibilities that pose existential questions about what it means to be human, what is natural and artificial, and how we might adapt to “new normal” whose full implications we do not yet understand. Extremes, after all, are relative; what seems extreme today may become routine tomorrow.
State of extremes aimed to show the potential of design to reveal, critique, resist, mitigate (and, yes, sometimes exacerbate) extremes and the mechanisms that drive them. At a time when our technologies, power structures, and impact on the planet are engendering ever more extreme scenarios, we hoped “state of extremes” might serve as a call for moderation.
Virgil Abloh | Atelier Van Lieshout (Joep Van Lieshout) | Rudy van Belkom and Merav Perez | Maya Ben David and Yuri Movshovich | Itamar Ben Shoshan | Bentzi Binder | Oz Biri | Matilda Boelhouwer | Stephan Bogner, Philipp Schmitt, Jonas Voigt | Violaine Buet, Julia Lohmann in collaboration with Jon Lister | IC4Design (Hirofumi Kamigaki and Daïsuke Matsubara) | Criaterra Earth Technologies (Adital Ela) | donttakethisthewrongway (Crawford George, Eric Primo, Nick Wargo) | Ferm Living | Adam Nathaniel Furman for Camp Design Gallery | Laminati | Snir Gedasi | Gymnasia Herzliya High School | Tel Aviv | Graviky Labs | Ai Hasegawa | Land and Civilization Compositions (Merve Bedir and Jason Hilgefort) | Yjin Huo | Noa Ilan | Nimrod Jack Eliezer | Anna Aagaard Jensen | Jun Kamei | Kuchinate with Gil Yefman | KIT Karlsruhe / ETH Zürich (Prof. Dirk E. Hebel) | Kilo Design | Klarenbeek & Dros in collaboration with Atelier Luma | Meydan Levy | Shahar Livne | Boris Maas | Made of Air (Allison Dring and Daniel Schwaag) | Kiki Mager | Tadas Maksimovas | Keiichi Matsuda | Lucy McRae | Dentsu and OPEN MEALS | Johnny Miller | Nervous System in collaboration with Miller Lab, Rice University, Houston | MIT Media Lab (Pinar Yanardag, Manuel Cebrian and Iyad Rahwan) | Neil Nenner and Avihai Mizrahi | Nicole Nomsa Moyo | Notpla Ltd. | Oddkin (Natela Lemondzhava and Marton Kabai) | Officina Corpuscoli (Maurizio Montalti) | Brian Olson | Ruurd Oosterwoud in collaboration with DROG | Orange Culture (Adebayo Oke-lawal) | | Bas Princen | RefuSHE | Keep and Bear | Nathan Smith and Sam T Smith | Klemens Schillinger | Sputniko! | Studio Ijeoma | Studio Plastique (Archibald Godts and Theresa Bastek) | Ezri Tarazi (Reasercher: Ofer Berman) | Design-Tech Lab, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology | TIPA Compostable Packaging | Terreform one (Mitchell Joachim) | The LADbible | Thomas Thwaites | Twist Bioscience | UBQ Materials Ltd. | UN Studio with Monopol Colors | Xandra van der Eijk | Varburg Group (Liane Rosenthal, Amit Portman, Alon Sarid) | Hongjie Yang | Kuang-Yi Ku | Liam Young | Huei Yin Wong, Producer: Jack Railton-Woodcock | Josiah Zayner, Open Discovery Institute | Qiu Zhijie
