Design Commissions
Jannetje in 't Veld and Toon Koehorst of Koehorst in 't Veld curated and designed the exhibitions WOOD (2014), GLASS and Atelier Nelly and Theo van Doesburg (2020).
Toon Koehorst and Jannetje in 't Veld have a background in graphic design and culture and media studies. Their first collaboration on an exhibition involved designing a graphic layer. But in late 2013, Guus Beumer (then director of Het Nieuwe Instituut) invited them to curate and produce an exhibition. "We knew right away that it was a wonderful opportunity," says Jannetje in 't Veld. "It turned out to be an important step in our career," agrees Toon Koehorst. In the following years, they collaborated on curating and designing numerous exhibitions. "While researching wood as a material, curator Dan Handel had gathered together a collection of drawings and a number of objects which needed to be transformed into an exhibition. It was essentially a storyline that needed editing." The designers encapsulated the research into clusters, such as the forest as a production landscape, as a refuge and as a sanctuary.
For Koehorst in 't Veld, there is very little difference between making a book and an exhibition. "Coming from a graphic design background, visuals are our starting point," says In 't Veld. "When you step into the exhibition space, your first thought should be: what do I see? In this case it was wood. This is where our approach differs from that of architects. They begin with the spatial choreography of the exhibition, with an expression in the space and its meaning. We start with communication. The difference between a book and an exhibition is that in the latter you also want to feel, hear, smell and experience the wood spatially." They believe the strength of the medium lies in its limitations. "You can only experience an exhibition in one place and in one moment in time, which makes visiting an exhibition an intense experience," says Koehorst. "That's why an exhibition has to be a kind of hyper-reality. We like to work with different levels. Through a handful of compelling objects and a gesture in the space, an exhibit should be able to communicate its basic concept to visitors within minutes. But it should also compel someone to linger for three quarters of an hour or more to dive deeper into a theme."
Objects play a definitive role in the exhibitions designed and curated by Koehorst in 't Veld. In GLASS. Engine of Progress, the exhibition design revolved around finding ways to present the glass objects. "Because glass is a transparent material, glass objects are notoriously difficult to light," explains In 't Veld. "We found the solution in the window of an off licence on the Nieuwe Binnenweg. The display featured magnum bottles, lit from the side with a fluorescent tube to enhance their contours. We borrowed that idea and designed modular exhibition elements with vertical light lines. The concept was based entirely on an optimal presentation of the objects."
"We discovered that, throughout history, new developments in glass have always spurred progress," says Koehorst. "Glass played a vital role in hygiene and in enabling us to see beyond the range of the human eye. Glass has driven numerous innovative technological applications." Every object in the exhibition can be traced back to the lens, the test tube and the fibre optic cable. The Crystal Palace in London, a vast glass structure that hosted the Great Exhibition of 1851, served as a model for the spatial design of the exhibition. The designers reimagined the typology of the horticultural 'glass city', replacing historic materials and spatial elements with their equivalents from modern greenhouses.
WOOD
Many of the qualities attributed to wood - natural, warm, pure - originate in the romantic appreciation of the forest. As such, both the latest and the rich historical narratives of wood are inextricably linked to the forest. But the forest is also a man-made landscape, a production machine subject to market laws. And current experiments with wood are leading to surprising applications in and outside the domains of architecture and design. The rich story of the exhibition _WOOD_ was told through design objects, architectural projects and artifacts from national and international collections.
GLASS
The evolution of glass forms the basis for innovations. This evolution leads to the lens and thus to the telescope, then to the tube and thus to the X-ray, and, more recently, to the fiberglass cable and thus to a virtually limitless development of the Web. The exhibition _GLASS _showed how this age-old, man-made material is still inextricably connected to progress and how it continuously challenges contemporary designers to innovative experiments.
Atelier Nelly and Theo van Doesburg
Atelier Nelly and Theo van Doesburg is part of the Het Nieuwe Instituut's Disclosing Architecture programme, which focuses on the restoration, conservation and digitisation of the architecture collection. "We were curious to see whether the exhibition could serve as a model for how a digital archive might work, by establishing new links between material in this archive and beyond," explains In 't Veld. "Much of that information now disappears when an exhibition is over. We saw the exhibition as a plea to improve the accessibility of the archive through digitisation, and to see what happens when objects are ordered by subjective relationships, not just by hierarchy. In which sense, the exhibition is primarily a dialogue with the National Collection for Dutch Architecture and Urban Planning."
Part of the exhibition focuses on Nelly, who, after Theo van Doesburg's death, was instrumental in promoting his work, and establishing his reputation. "At the time of his death, Van Doesburg's legacy was not fully appreciated. It wasn't until the 1970s that the Zeitgeist was ready for his multidisciplinary approach," says Koehorst. "We developed what we call an 'image cloud' composed of visual material, mostly photos, that we had sourced from different archives," adds In 't Veld. "The exhibition was a kind of spatial cloud of images through which you could move freely, with thematic installations supplemented with reference material."
Archives have become a crucial and exciting part of the Koehorst in 't Veld research process. Time and again, the designers dive into disparate collections and uncover a treasure trove of unexpected finds. Says Koehorst: "We enjoy re-ordering things. If you display an object from the Rijksmuseum next to one from the Hema, you can free objects from their hierarchies and tell a new and more diverse story."