bio 50 / 24th biennial of design – ljubljana
presentation with cvetka požar and maja vardjan
in collaboration with MAO – Museum of Architecture and Design – Ljubljana
in the framework of the exhibition Map Pin / 11th International Design Contest Trieste Contemporanea
Trieste , Studio Tommaseo (via del Monte 2/1 )
Friday, October 24th, 7pm
The 24th Biennial of Design in Ljubljana BIO 50 has this year a special venue in Trieste, thanks to the collaboration between MAO, the Museum of Architecture and Design in Ljubljana, and the Trieste Contemporanea Committee. Due to this collaboration, the MAP PIN exhibition is on display at the Studio Tommaseo in Trieste until November 3rd as an integral part of the programme of exhibitions and events that are ongoing until December 7th in the Slovenian capital and form the platform "3,2,1… TEST" created for the fiftieth Biennial of Ljubljana by its director Jan Boelen (http://bio.si/en/).
The contribute to the Ljubljana Biennial by Trieste Contemporanea, with the concluding exhibition of his Eleventh International Design Contest, confirms the international interest in this comeptition, born in 1995 from an idea of Gillo Dorfles and that over the years has resulted in showing in Trieste the new projects by several thousand of European designers.
The important 2014 Slovenian/Italian collaboration – with the innovative planning of a Biennial’s programme of events to be held also in venues outside of the city of Ljubljana – perfectly matches the vision for the 24th Biennial that would be, in the words of Belgian curator Boelen: BIO 50 is a complex, transformative effort that seeks to strengthen local and international design networks, search for alternatives to implemented systems where design can play a role as a tool to question and transform ideas about industrial production, public and private space, and pre-established systems and networks.
Maja Vardjan and Cvetka Požar, who collaborated with Jan Boelen in designing this year Biennial, will talk and focus in Trieste on the fragile nature of this problematic disciplinary transition . The two curators of the MAO will also offer a historical overview on the fifty years of activity of the Biennial that, since its founding in 1964, has been the most prestigious appointment on the state of contemporary design from the heart of Central Europe.
Cvetka Požar, PhD, is an art historian and curator at the Museum of Architecture and Design (MAO). She is the author of the exhibition and book To the Polling Booths! The Poster as a Political Medium in Slovenia 1945-1999. She was the co-curator of several exhibitions, most recently of Iskra: Non-Aligned Design 1946-1990 and Designing the Republic: Architecture, Design and Photography in Slovenia, 1991-2011. She has edited several exhibition catalogues and is co-editor of MAO’s AML Contemporary Book series.
Maja Vardjan is an architect and curator. Following her period as creative director of the T5 Project Space gallery and as the architecture editor of Ambient magazine, she currently works as curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Architecture and Design (MAO). She is the author of the Design and Dialogue publication and the curator of the Silent Revolutions: Contemporary Design in Slovenia exhibition. Recently she has been curator of Under the Common Roof, an exhibition of drawings on modern public buildings from MAO’s archive.