The Critical Tide exhibition, which was on display at the Design Museum earlier this year, will open in Brussels on 3 December at the premises of the Committee of the Regions. The exhibition, now opened in the capital of Europe, which attracted a great deal of interest, is showcasing various projects and works of art which seek to provide solutions to the poor condition of the sea while at the same time shaping people’s attitudes towards the sea. The Design Museum hopes that the exhibition, arranged during Finland’s EU presidency, will awaken European decision-makers to seek solutions for saving the world’s seas.
The ongoing ecological crisis is reflected in the state of the seas: the seawater is warming up and acidifying, sea levels are rising, and corals are whitening. Via Critical Tide, the team of multidisciplinary professionals behind this exhibition are addressing these problems through critical design.
Critical Tide is part of the Design Museum’s three-year Design Club Open Call series which seeks to find influential content and to offer companies an opportunity to support new and creative openings. The theme of the 2019 exhibition, for which potential exhibitors were invited to present their ideas, was critical design, and Critical Tide with its important societal theme which is of concern to everybody was chosen from among the candidates.
”We are very pleased that the exhibition is now continuing. We also hope that it will catch the attention of EU decision-makers. One of the tasks of museums is to stimulate and promote debate on big and difficult societal issues. The new Architecture and Design Museum, for which plans are now being made, seeks to strengthen the societal role of architecture and design and to provide a meeting point for debate around such issues. Exhibition openings, which Critical Tide exemplifies, provide excellent examples of this kind of activity,” says Jukka Savolainen, Director of the Design Museum.
The exhibition was created by a multi-professional, international team: Julia Lohmann (designer and professor at Aalto University based in Helsinki), Pirjo Haikola (designer, scuba diving instructor and researcher at RMIT in Melbourne), Gillian Russell (designer, curator and researcher at Emily Carr University in Vancouver) and Gero Grundmann (designer and illustrator based in Helsinki).
”Design has played a key role in creating the unsustainable modes of operation of modern society, and the design industry continues to make a major contribution to our consumption-oriented, high-emission lifestyle,” the workgroup members comment.
The Critical Tide exhibition will be on display between 3 December 2019 and 15 January 2020 at the Committee of the Regions, Jaques Delors Building Rue Belliard 99-101, Brussels.
The Critical Tide exhibition is supported by the Design Museum´s Design Club member Pharmaceutical Information Centre
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