November, 2024
BIO28 Double Agent: Do You Speak Flower?
28th Edition of The Biennial of Design
November 21, 2024 – April 6, 2025
Museum of Architecture and Design (MAO), Ljubljana
https://28.bio.si/en/
About the exhibition design
Urška and Jure Sadar (Studio Sadar) designed the exhibition of the 28th Edition of The Biennial of Design: Double Agent: Do You Speak Flower?, curated by Alexandra Midal. The exhibition was located at two venues: at the Museum of Architecture and Design and the Isis Gallery, and was divided into thematic sections.
Through the combined use of delicately designed folded vertical elements and minimalistic horizontal plinths the exhibition as a whole reflects the dual perspective inherent in its title. Studio Sadar reimagines the classical gallery wall; through cutting, stacking, and folding walls, diverse spatial moments are created alongside functions designed to best showcase the exhibits. Horizontal floating plinths provide a minimalist platform for observing artworks from above, while vertical folded walls inspired by origami and floral forms divide larger rooms into smaller, more intimate environments. Exhibition design fosters a sense of discovery, as visitors encounter unexpected perspectives and combinations of compositions during their visit. Natural daylight plays a key role in shaping the experience; the shifting light throughout the day interacts with both the plinths and walls, enhancing the thematic connection to flowers, whose meanings can vary depending on context and time.
The exhibition offers a layered, immersive experience, encouraging an ongoing debate and reflection on the role of design in contemporary society.
About the exhibition
Double Agent: Do You Speak Flower? transcends the traditional exhibition format, serving as a multi-faceted proclamation that engages with the past and present and intertwines design, art, and cinema. Often flirting with popular culture, Double Agent: Do You Speak Flower? explores the unsuspected tactics of concealment that can lurk beneath the delicate, romantic language of floriography. Floral ornaments have gained in polysemy throughout the twentieth century: examples of their political implications abound, from Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Flower Power’ to the 1974 Carnation Revolution in Portugal, which put an end to forty years of Salazarist dictatorship, and the British custom of wearing remembrance poppies. This shows that the language of flowers reaches far beyond the gallantry embedded in Victorian floristry.
BIO28 shows that the association of women and ornaments, specifically in the analogy of the woman-flower, has often engendered astonishing works of camouflage beyond the hyper-sexualised metonymy of female genitalia and flowers claimed by scientists since the 19th century. At the same time, the woman-as-flower association proliferated in the arts, literature and poetry. Confined to the status of sexually pure and passive, and hence desirable, objects, women were depicted surrounded by bouquets of flowers in their homes or in flower gardens, symbolising their place in the world.
Double Agent: Do You Speak Flower? shows the manner in which a feminist floriography has emphasised the importance of strategies, tricks, and other deceptive simulacra to convey its messages. Invited to decode messages hidden in the language of flowers, in an ultimate twist, the visitordiscoversthatapalimpsestic flower entails a political turn as it reinvests the aesthetic trivialisation of floral variations. Between appearances and mystification, the visitor realises that the manipulation of form is as important as ever when it comes to fighting oppression. Drawing on a non-exhaustive range of critical and speculative associations, the political and feminist steganography operates under the cover of the seemingly neutral and seductive banality of floral language. Combining aesthetics and feminism, the double agent that is embodied by cunning is revealed in the final exhibiting spaces.
