Common Knowledge
The 26th Biennial of Design, BIO 26 – Common Knowledge is curated by Austrian design curator and cultural producer Thomas Geisler together with assistant curator Aline Lara Rezende.
Under the motto Common Knowledge, this year’s Biennial of Design tackles the information crisis. BIO 26 presents six winning projects selected through the Designathon in which groups of designers and non-designers took on the challenges pressing on the institutions of knowledge production and knowledge transmission. The projects are presented at the 26th Biennial of Design, BIO 26 – Common Knowledge, which takes place between 14 November 2019 and 9 February 2020 in Ljubljana.
Working with content, structures, and stakeholders, the 26th Biennial of Design in Ljubljana hopes to find ways, unearth projects, and explore concepts and systems that can serve to turn this disruptive chaos in and of information into creative knowledge clusters. The notion of “common knowledge” relates and refers to what people know; more broadly, if refers to what people think and how they structure their ideas, feelings, and beliefs. Furthermore, the term “common knowledge” carries a sense of communal or shared knowledge.
Aleš Pustovrh received his PhD in open innovation in 2014 at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. He studies new forms of innovation, emerging innovation systems, and business models connected to them at this university. His activities are not limited to academic research on the topic because he is also systematically working with startup companies and large corporations trying to achieve accelerated growth. As such, he is one of the founders of the ABC venture accelerator and a partner at a venture capital fund. In both his academic and other activities, he remains closely connected to southeast, eastern, and central Europe, using these diverse environments and experiences as inputs for his research. With this focus, he has collaborated with several institutions from these regions, including the University of Trieste, Italy, where he worked for eighteen months.
Amelie Klein is a curator at the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany, where most recently she opened the international traveling exhibition “Victor Papanek: The Politics of Design.” Her previous international exhibitions include “Hello, Robot. Design between Human and Machine” and “Making Africa—A Continent of Contemporary Design.” Klein was nominated twice for the Art Magazine Curator Prize, an award granted for the best exhibitions in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. She completed a master’s degree in design criticism at New York’s School of Visual Arts as well as an MBA at the Vienna University of Economics and Business, Austria. She was the design editor for the Austrian daily newspaper Die Presse in Vienna and deputy editor-in-chief of its weekly supplement Schaufenster. Her writing has also appeared in publications such as Metropolis, Abitare, Domus online, and Stylepark.
Deyan Sudjic is the director of the Design Museum in London. His career has spanned journalism, teaching, and writing. Deyan was director of Glasgow UK City of Architecture 1999, and in 2002 he was director of the Venice Architecture Biennale. He was editor of Domus Magazine from 2000 to 2004, and was the founding editor of Blueprint Magazine from 1983 to 1996. Deyan has published many books on design and architecture, including The Edifice Complex (Penguin, 2006), The Language of Things (Penguin, 2008), Norman Foster: A Life in Architecture (Orion, 2010), Shiro Kuramata (Phaidon, 2013), B Is for Bauhaus (Penguin 2014), and Ettore Sottsass, the Poetry of Things (Phaidon 2015). His most recent book, The Language of Cities, was published by Penguin in October 2016. Deyan was awarded the Order of the British Empire in 2000.
Johnny Golding is a professor of philosophy and fine art, and a senior research tutor at the Royal College of Art, London. Golding’s work situates post-Newtonian analytics, new materialisms, and the erotics of sense as “radical matter,” a practice-led encounter with contemporary philosophy, art, and the wild sciences. She heads the doctoral research group Entanglement, an intensive PhD environment including twenty-one PhD researchers; she leads it together with the artist Emma Talbot, and last year led it with the artist Aura Satz. Golding’s latest works include: Entanglement: The Opera (RCA, January 2019), The Photograph of Thought (2019), Friendship (EUP, 2018), and Of the Thick and the Raw: Cannibalising the 21st Century (OAR, Oxford, 2018). Her recent texts and poetic-philosophic installations have been exhibited at the Venice Biennale and in Vienna, Bogotá, and Berlin.
Maja Vardjan has been a curator at Museum of Architecture and Design in Ljubljana since January 2013. Following her time as creative director of the gallery T5 Project Space and the architecture editor of the magazine Ambient, she now curates exhibitions in architecture and design. These have included Silent Revolutions: Contemporary Design in Slovenia (2011–2015), Under the Common Roof: Modern Public Buildings from the Museum’s Collection and Other Archives (2013), Saša J. Mächtig: Systems, Structures, Strategies (2015), and Stanko Kristl. Humanity and Space (2017). Since 2013, she has been actively involved in the transformation of the Ljubljana Biennial of Design, which is today conceived as a production platform for new approaches in design. She co-curated BIO 50: 3, 2, 1 . . . TEST (2014) and Faraway, So Close, the biennial’s twenty-fifth edition, for which she received the ICOM Slovenia award.