London-based design studio CMP Office has showcased some luxury products on the blocks of soap to criticize the disordered production chain that changes of our perception on design objects. 

Titled Open Sesame, CMP Office's installation, designed by Charlotte-Maëva Perret, is presented under the sub-title of "Currents School" at the 4th Istanbul Design Biennial, which runs from September 22, 2018 to November 4, 2018 in Istanbul, Turkey.

Curated by Jan Boelen, this year's Biennial is themed as "A School of Schools" and exhibited under six sub-titled themes in six venues: Yapı Kredi Culture Centre - Currents School, Pera Museum - Scales School, Arter - Earth School, SALT Galata - Time School, Studio-X Istanbul - Digestion School and Akbank Sanat - Unmaking School. 

Currents School, displayed at the Yapı Kredi Culture Centre, explores information networks, spheres and connections, both digital and analogue, abstract and embodied – to critically examine technologies and hierarchies.

In this regard, CMP Offices' installation requestions the replacement of these speculation fragments on the production culture on design objects. 

"Ali Baba was a kind, smart business person, and he helped the village,” founder of Alibaba.com Jack Ma recalls. Based on an allegorical relationship between the ancient Syrian folktale and the Chinese E-commerce consumer-to-factory online sales service provider, Open Sesame is a meditative installation of speculative fragments that offers a space for reflection on how precarious societies can conceive communities, design objects and produce cultures," stated CMP Office in its project description.

"The migration of Aleppo soap factories, leather craftsmen replicating luxury handbags, and street vendors reclaiming European capitals' civic spaces, Open Sesame investigates our ‘World New Disordered’ cycles of production and macro scale displacements in relation to micro intimacies. Do consumers have the agency to provoke large-scale transformations?."

Organized by the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (IKSV), the biennial brings together projects from more than 200 interdisciplinary practitioners from across the globe. 

Presented under the theme of "A School of Schools", the biennial, curated by Jan Boelen and associate curators Vera Sacchetti and Nadine Botha, delves into different norms of design education as a transdisciplinary and experimental base. 

World Architecture Community is Media Partner of the Biennial and covers the hottest installations, discussions and updated news from the event.

All images © Kayhan Kaygusuz, courtesy of Istanbul Design Biennial

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