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The Elephant Escaped Exhibition
By : Ballistic Architecture Machine (BAM)
GRANDS PRIX DU DESIGN – 16th edition
Discipline : Interior Design
Categories : Culture, Sport & Leisure / Museum & Gallery : Gold Certification
Categories : Special Awards / Interior Design + Art Integration : Gold Certification
‘The Elephant Escaped’, implies a controversial relationship between humans and wilderness or “Nature”, a fundamental theme to BAM’s project portfolio and design practice. One of the key ideas for the curatorial team which BAM embraced and continued to develop was the concept of the works being enmeshed. BAM saw it as an interesting curatorial position in which works are not really intended to stand on their own. The works are essentially incomplete without the interaction of the other pieces. This type of interaction is a fundamental to standard curatorial practices in which works are juxtaposed and their curated relationship creates new possible readings. However, it is not common that independent works from different artists are treated as integral parts of the other artists’ works.
With regards to the development of the exhibition design, this idea of ‘enmeshing’ translated into taking various ideas about the intended display of the works provided by the individual artists and attempting to push them further, so that the boundaries of any one piece are not inherently clear. Throughout the design process BAM worked with the artists, using design as a tool to guide and to express the interaction, collisions and dialogue between the works in ways that neither the curatorial team nor the artists had initially envisioned.
There are various relationships between the pieces and the different spaces of the exhibition. The first floor is open, transparent, and light, which contrasts with the second floor which is more secluded, opaque, and dark. This condition was inherent in the architectural conditions of the spaces established by the architectural design, yet the two floors are not envisioned as polar opposites, like black and white, but more akin to two sides of a coin, a single element that looks different depending on the perspective.
