highlike

Irina Dzhus

DZHUS SS21
Now that sustainable consumption is a more relevant topic than ever, DZHUS has created a collection inspired by the variety of packaging, to draw attention to the importance of recycling. The SS21 designs interpret the visual and structural peculiarities of boxes, packets and wraps of all kinds. Multi-purpose use of clothing has always been crucial to DZHUS, as a revolutionary method to minimise customers’ shopping and diversify their wardrobe at the same time. All pieces from the spring/summer line are transformers, and most garments can be modified into bags in a swift and playful manner.

Thomas Hirschhorn

توماس هيرشهورن
托马斯·赫塞豪恩
תומס הירשהורן
トーマス·ヒルシュホルン
abschlag

Thomas Hirschhorn’s “Abschlag” installation, which occupies the first room on the main floor, offers a lesson in how not to engage with the Russian milieu: the Swiss artist constructed part of a typical Petersburg apartment block out of cardboard inside the full-height space, ripped off its façade, and deposited the refuse at its base, revealing shabby interiors lined with original avant-garde masterpieces (on loan from the nearby Russian Museum) by the likes of Malevich and El Lissitky. The references allude to a politically radical Russian past; the construction debris acts as a metaphor for history. Though Hirschhorn suggests a recovery of the revolutionary communist spirit of the 1920s, he falls prey to a historically revisionist fetish: citing the Russian avant-garde as a generative point for vanguard culture in the West, and offering it as a source for renewed progressivism in Russia. Hirschhorn seems woefully unaware of the Putin government’s branding campaign, one that aims to sell the Russian avant-guard as a nationalist movement in line with the regime’s own values (perhaps he didn’t watch the Sochi opening ceremony). Hirschhorn ultimately proves Zhilayev right — with its political pretenses, “Abschlag” aspires to make a grand gesture against conservatism, but fails because its critique has already been co-opted..
.

RYOICHI KUROKAWA

黒川良一
rheo
This world-renowned Japanese artist’s impressive audiovisual compositions bring visual and sonic material together using a completely revolutionary perspective. His language, a new international benchmark in the world of digital art, field recordings and computer-generated structures coexist in harmony, and open the gateway to an imaginary world where complexity and simplicity alternate and combine in a strange symbiosis.

LARS VON TRIER

لارس فون ترير
拉斯·冯·特里尔
라스 폰 트리에
לארס פון טרייר
ラース·フォン·トリアー
Ларс фон Триер
melancholia
Truth be told, the best thing about Melancholia is its title. In an era where pop therapy abounds, true melancholy and its affinity to beauty needs to be rehabilitated—and of course differentiated from the more banal categories of “mental illness” and “depression.” In a pivotal phase of German Romanticism exemplified by Novalis’ poetry, the quintessentially melancholy category of “longing” is linked with a quest for the “unattainable.” Yet there’s also a tangibly utopian element to Novalis’ melancholy, personified by his dictum, “All representation rests on making present that which is not present.” Or as Max Blechman puts it in his essay “The Revolutionary Dream of Early German Romanticism, the Romantics pantheistic faith points to how art and religion are fundamentally one and the same activity. For is not art the desire to see the real in the ideal, to enliven the ideal behind the real, to transform unconscious idealism into conscious idealism—and is this not done through faith in the ideal?”

MARIA BLAISSE

Spheres
Dutch designer Maria Blaisse is one of those legends. She began in the early 80s’ by creating spherical foam forms that moulded and folded in ways that were revolutionary at the time and she worked primarily in dance wear where she is still breaking new ground today. Blaisse then went on to collaborate with Issey Miyake for whom she made mitre-like rubber hats.

Maud de Le Pladec

DEMOCRACY
Compagnie LEDA

“I’ve wanted to work on the drum quartet “Dark Full Ride” by Julia Wolfe for a long time. There is something quite revolutionary in the energy of this piece. Julia Wolfe uses the instrumentation of processions, meetings and political demonstrations. I work on democracy, not democracy reduced its political framework definition […] but ‘insurgent’ democracy that strives for the dissolution of certainty and the claim to equality as civil resistance. Work is nourished by ideas like the test of determination or the idea of a problematizing community, which I call the ‘all-one.’ Also, how does an individual decision open the possibility to collective action? What do we strive for, or against? Who do we give our consent to? Must we disobey democracy? How do we build a controversialist community? Does resistance to power define the democratic experience? What is a savage democracy? … ” Maud Le Pladec

ROBERT WUN

last breathe

Robert Wun is a luxury fashion label, aimed to create ingenious garments with sophistication visions, to inspire independent individuals with originality beliefs. The chaos between Nature and artificial forms the centre of the design ethos, through resourcing in the novelty nature and the revolutionary artificial world, Robert Wun believe in such contradiction, promising ideas will be generated through the process of perplexity. Dictating the new ‘futuristic’ through innovative manufacturing yet with uncompromising attention to traditional values. Creating the harmony by combining enlightening ideas with sophistication craftsmanship, brining in a new dimension to luxury garments and also to the young London fashion industry.

JAMES LAW CYBERTECTURE INTERNATIONAL

Cybertecture Egg
Cybertecture is the revolutionary concept that provides a symbiotic relationship between the urban fabric and technology. Pioneered in 2001, Cybertecture forges both the hardware of the built environment and software systems and technologies from the micro to macro scales of development.The genesis of Cybertecture is in response to man’s progress into the 21st century, where working and living environments need to adapt and evolve to cope with the demands of modern working life. It plays an integral part in this evolution by providing awareness and connectivity via seamless integration of technology into the fabric of space.Cybertecture designs, from technology, products and interiors to systems, buildings and masterplans, allow flexibility and accessibility to inform, adapt, react, communicate, manipulate and control environments, whilst being sustainable and environmentally considered in application and context.Cybertecture embraces the future through continuous innovation and evolution of design and technology. It provides a myriad of solutions, all of which are diverse in individual application but holistic to the overall user environment, and always being integrated with innovation being pursued.

NIKOLA TESLA

نيكولا تيسلا
尼古拉•特斯拉
ניקולה טסלה
ニコラ·テスラ
니콜라 테슬라
Никола Тесла

Tesla is often described as an important scientist and inventor of modernity, a man who “shed light on the face of the Earth”.] He is best known for his many revolutionary contributions in the field of electromagnetism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. . Tesla’s patents and his theoretical work form the basis of modern alternating current (AC) electrical power systems, including polyphasic energy distribution systems and the AC motor, with which he helped in the introduction of the Second Industrial Revolution.