Sorcha Dallas

By the end of the 1970s the Memphis Group eventually pushed the ideas of eclecticism and deconstruction of design history to the limits. Their designs were anarchic in their entire disrespectfulness towards categories such as quality and sophistication. Memphis turned this clash of form and material into a fetish and made the principle, sometimes, into a harmless and highly overworked bad-taste-design. For many years nobody wanted to see or hear anything of Memphis anymore. But lately some artists and designers have started to purse the traces of this chapter again. We asked Berlin based artists Nairy Baghramian and Julian Gothe to jointly develop a new interior for the foyer of the Kunsthalle Basel. The foyer, shich is now more spacious than before, includes as a communicative meeting point the box office and the bookshops of the Kunsthalle and the Architekturmuseukm. Based on the function of the foyer the artists have decided on a range of furniture which builds an independent and closed aesthetical unit that is absolute but which still – if confronted with each other in one room – would display an unexpected interplay. In both book-tables you find shapes reminiscent of museum or sacred interiors of the 19th Century. Both twin desks for the box office and the small side table for the reading lounge are abstractly shaped and appear almost graphical in their uneven black and white patterns. The lounge has been arranged with objects displaying various design historical cross-overs and new realisations. Nairy Baghramian and Julian Gothe have both worked artistically in their own unique ways on the threshold of sculpture and furniture before. For the foyer of the Kunsthalle Basel they have focused on the spatial and functional conditions and developed an overall concept, combining a whole range of ideas that are aesthetically sometimes subtle and sometimes very boldly realised. The institutional space of the foyer has now been transformed through individual ideas or interior design into public décor.

ANKE KEMPKES