Metahaven for Melbourne Design Week

Metahaven: Field Report brings the art and design practice of Metahaven to Australia for the first time at RMIT Design Hub Gallery.

Debuting as a headline event in March 2020, the Amsterdam-based artists, filmmakers and designers have a reputation for exploring issues of propaganda and its implications in the digital age.

Field Report features major film and sound installation Eurasia (Questions on Happiness), 2018, which centres around narratives of political fragmentation in Europe.

“Metahaven: Field Report focuses on the intersection of digital media, technology and politics,” according to a statement.

“In today’s era of information overload, everyone is potentially a broadcaster, designer and filmmaker, and simultaneously a prosecutor, judge and key witness. Metahaven’s films and visual installations probe the increasingly blurred line between fact and fiction.”

Metahaven’s Daniel van der Velden and Vinca Kruk says, “The film invokes questions about the changing relationship between Europe, Russia and Asia, and the interfaces and infrastructures through which this relationship is rendered.”

RMIT Design Hub Gallery, curator, Kate Rhodes and Fleur Watson says, “Exhibition visitors are invited to lie or sit on a custom-made, hand-tufted carpet to experience Eurasia. The exhibition also includes a series of newly conceived textile works that together with Eurasia, ask visitors to reassess the truth-quality of information in the media and its effect on our daily lives.”

The exhibition presents Arrows, 2020, a series of new textile works specifically commissioned for Design Hub Gallery.