Art Jewelry Unleashed!

I just found out about this exhibition taking place at the Museum voor Moderne Kunst Arnhem:

Te the MMKA presents the exhibition Unleashed!, an overview of rule-breaking jewellery. In this state-of-the-art overview, pieces of jewellery will break out of the museum cases and be scattered over the walls and floors and decorate streets and squares. From small imaginative brooches to portraits of pop-stars woven from strings of pearls and meters-high pieces interwoven with street furniture: in Unleashed! an international community of jewellery designers shows that the possibilities and applications of jewellery are almost boundless. Art Jewellery Unleashed! is an exhibition featuring jewellery with connections to the visual arts, fashion and design: art jewellery. This type of jewellery has developed worldwide over the past forty to fifty years. Since the end of the 1960s, the Netherlands has played an important role in this development -— a reason for the MMKA to collect and present these pieces of jewellery from the beginning. Thirty designers The exhibition brings together existing work, as well as pieces made especially for the exhibition, from over thirty designers from all over the world. There are pieces on display from artists like: Natalya Pinchuk (United States), Lisa Walker (New Zealand), Pia Aleborg (Sweden), Mia Maljojoki (Finland / Munich), Mari Keto (Finland / Copenhagen), Suska Mackert (Germany / Hamburg), Christian Hoedl (Austria / Munich), Celio Braga (Brazil/ Amsterdam), Frédéric Braham (France), Jiro Kamata (Japan /Germany), and Lucy Sarneel, Liesbeth Bussche, and Erik Kuiper from the Netherlands. This is the first time in many years that work by international jewellery designers has been displayed in the Netherlands on such a scale. (The last large international exhibition was Facet at the Kunsthal Rotterdam in 1993). The exhibition features brooches in cases, jewellery on the walls and floors, as well as pieces set in street scenes -— so-called Urban Jewellery. Tags In addition to pieces of jewellery, the exhibition features other media that today’s jewellery designers use, like photography, video, books and documents, installations and interactive projects. Atelier Ted Noten, for instance, is featuring ‘Tags’ Smartphone Jewellery, a virtual exhibition in the city of posters with ‘tags’ that provide extra information, like a sort of Wikileaks, varying from political commentary (for example: blood diamonds), and facts (the price of gold), to narrative information (life in a gold mine). If you scan all the tags with a smart phone, you get a code you can use to redeem a specially printed piece of jewellery in the museum. Reference work The recently published book On Jewellery by Liesbeth den Besten, guest curator of the exhibition, serves as a new reference work where you can read about the many aspects of art jewellery and the current state of affairs in this field. More activities…. • photo exhibition at the Dudok café brasserie in the centre of Arnhem. • international symposium • weekend of events with evening opening, music, workshops, lectures, performances • extensive educational programme • pop-up store where jewellery can be bought for reasonable prices

The exhibition closes on February 6, 2012
There will also be an “Unleashed!” Symposium on February 3rd. For more information click here.

Museum voor Moderne Kunst Arnhem
Utrechtseweg 87 6812 AA Arnhem,
Netherlands
t +31(0)26 377 53 00
e info@mmkarnhem.nl