Open Space–Mind Maps. Positions in Contemporary Jewellery is an exhibition of contemporary art jewellery. The exhibition features 30 artists from all over the world, with about 160 works on display.
11 March –15 May 2016
Shown at Nationalmuseum Design at Kulturhuset Stadsteatern.
The exhibition Open Space – Mind Maps. Positions in Contemporary Jewellery intends to illustrate the point at which the actual art in jewellery arrived and what cultural messages take on the most crucial importance in this context. The jewellery in the exhibition represents adventure and experimentation aimed at opposing and protesting against traditional customs, propagandising a type of beauty that unifies provocation and aesthetics at the same time.
Jewellery long ago breached frontiers, and acts as artistic field research, participating in the current topics of art in our time. In our context, jewellery no longer represents a simple decoration or a status symbol, but an aesthetic discourse and artistic position that reacts to everyday life events, to personal history and experience, to worldwide developments and new forms of communications and perception. It handles the contents as contributions to the art, within and beyond the same classical frames. We are moving in an open space and every object, every piece contains the mind map of the singular artist and his or her cultural background.
In the exhibition 30 artists from the international scene will present the public with jewels and conceptual works, complemented with examples from the young collection of Nationalmuseum. In total there will be about 160 works on display.
The selection of artists also covers the foremost academies and universities in the field of jewellery. Sophie Hanagarth teaches in Strasbourg, Karen Pontoppidan at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, Miro Sazdic at Ädellab at Konstfack in Stockholm, Suska Mackert at the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg and Mikiko Minewaki at the Hiko Mizuno College in Tokyo and so on. Their work demonstrates the stronger impact of female artists, who provide a paradigm shift in handwriting, style, thematic issues and the appearance of jewellery today. This is also one of the reasons why the exhibition focuses in particular on the aspect of gender positions and gender shifts.
The exhibition is curated by Dr. Ellen Maurer Zilioli, who is based in Munich, Germany.
