Goodbye expectations
installation, 2017The exhibition is the result of a research into the connection between the concept of home and consumerism, embodied in the text from Ikea catalogues and how they present the contemporary home. The exhibition points out hidden mechanisms and rhetorics of mass media identified in Guy Debord’s book ‘The Society Of The Spectacle’, focusing on the text from the 2017 Ikea catalogue. There are no rules anymore in designing and behaving in your home, you can be yourself and ‘be as crazy as you want’, clearly illustrating a repackaging of consumerist tactics.
I turned the gallery into an Ikea showroom dotted with various works I made on the theme, including ready-mades, drawings and collages. Each room in the exhibition had one main piece (a tablecloth, a bedsheet and a carpet, digitally printed textiles) deconstructing the language used in the catalogue both visually and semantically through the use of expressive typography, pointing out these hidden rhetorical mechanisms.
The exhibition also aims to blur the line between different spaces: an Ikea showroom, a home and an art gallery.
Exhibited in: ‘Goodbye Expectations’, Visual Kontakt gallery in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, 2017, curated by Olimpia Bera
Photos by Stefan Badulescu