Akhoj 01
Kasper AKHØJ presents a slideshow which comprises the latest chapter in his ongoing research into the display system Abstracta, originally designed by the Danish architect and designer Poul Cadovious in the 1960s for a world’s fair. Comprising bright welded steel tubing with star-shaped joints commonly supporting glass or wooden panels, the modules were first encountered by Akhøj in department stores and museums in the former Yugoslavia. His subsequent investigations follow the traces of its imitation and mass production in China in the 1970s, its subsequent local manufacture across communist Eastern Europe, its recent patenting by a U.S. trade show systems company, its presence in the collection of MoMA, New York, as well as an encounter with Abstracta’s now elderly designer who was unaware of the ideological adult life of his creation. In Akhøj’s (or rather, ‘Abstracta’’s) travelogue, what appears to be a purely practical system, conceived with reproducibility, easy assembly and storage, and seemingly endless geometric expansion in mind, finds itself forming the shapes of an intriguing and elegantly obsessive narrative.
Akhoj 01
Kasper AKHØJ presents a slideshow which comprises the latest chapter in his ongoing research into the display system Abstracta, originally designed by the Danish architect and designer Poul Cadovious in the 1960s for a world’s fair. Comprising bright welded steel tubing with star-shaped joints commonly supporting glass or wooden panels, the modules were first encountered by Akhøj in department stores and museums in the former Yugoslavia. His subsequent investigations follow the traces of its imitation and mass production in China in the 1970s, its subsequent local manufacture across communist Eastern Europe, its recent patenting by a U.S. trade show systems company, its presence in the collection of MoMA, New York, as well as an encounter with Abstracta’s now elderly designer who was unaware of the ideological adult life of his creation. In Akhøj’s (or rather, ‘Abstracta’’s) travelogue, what appears to be a purely practical system, conceived with reproducibility, easy assembly and storage, and seemingly endless geometric expansion in mind, finds itself forming the shapes of an intriguing and elegantly obsessive narrative.