School of Design Exhibition at Central House of Artists

The exhibition Design NEXT opened last Wednesday at the Central House of Artists in Moscow’s Krimsky Val area. This is the continuation of the first Moscow Biennale of Design, which took place in 2017. During the event, group exhibitions by Moscow design universities were all brought together at a single location. The exhibition also featured personal expositions by Russian graphic, industrial, and fashion designers, including Anna Kulachek and School of Design Curators Alexandra Lartseva, Stephan Lashko, Philipp Tretyakov, and Tim Yarzhombek.

The HSE School of Design has presented a major exhibition at which works by students from different educational areas are showcased. Visitors are able to see the graphic design work by students from the Communications Design programme, animations and illustrations by students from the Animation and Illustration programme, multimedia projects by students from the Game Design and Virtual Reality and Design and Coding programmes, and interior objects developed within the Environmental Design programme. We will also feature collections by students from the Fashion programme, as well as works by students from the Photography in Fashion and Advertising programme and installations by students from the Theatre and Cinema Artist and Design and Contemporary Art programmes.

‘We adhered to a transparent concept – showing a current section of the School of Design’s workflow while demonstrating the top-quality work of its students from different educational areas. The main difficulty was combining such diverse materials and showing the multi-vector nature of the school in the space; after all, it is actively developing in very different fields. It was extremely important to find a single expositional solution that allows heterogeneous elements to be brought together. We tried to achieve this through expositional design and by working with light and projections. The exhibition seems to have been a success, and we plan to continue creating large-scale projects like this. We have a lot of talented students and good projects, so there is something to put on display,’ said Arseniy Sergeev, the curator of the exhibition and a School of Design instructor.

The designer of the exhibition is School of Design Curator Anna Kosheleva, who said that working on an exhibition of this size is a very interesting undertaking that has its own internal difficulties and particularities:

‘When I started working, I thought that exhibiting design works on standard boards and putting them onto a regular grid within the plane of a wall was all very boring, particularly for such diverse content. I wanted something new – to interact with the audience and with the platform, to break the rules of existing in a space containing exhibition objects and to uncover new rules. There were a lot of ideas, but in the end everything led to a system where you can violate the ordinary horizon and the corner in which the audience views the works. Using additional graphics, the planes of the walls seemed to slant, and the content lined up with the diagonals, thereby breaking with the geometry of the space. It was important to reflect that each field of design (from classic graphic design to gaming design, coding, and contemporary art and theatre) is unique in its own way, exists by its own rules, breathes in a modern space, and is able to bring this all together into a single system. The hardest part was probably straying from the standard layout without smothering the content, which is interesting in and of itself. I hope this ended up working. Though this was my first experience working with an exhibition of this scale, I am pleased with the result.’

This School of Design exhibition is open until April 22 on the third floor of the Central House of Artists in halls 22-27.