Out of Joint

Alongside its role as the Artistic Director for the 2023 London Design Biennale, the Nieuwe Instituut, the Netherlands national museum and institute for architecture, design and digital culture, presents Out of Joint for the Dutch Pavilion entry.  

Commissioned in collaboration with the Embassy of the Netherlands in the United Kingdom and curated by spatial designer and editor Colin Keays, Out of Joint responds to the Biennale theme of The Global Game: Remapping Collaborations by reflecting on our current global uncertainty. Inspired by the architecture of bureaucratic spaces, the Dutch pavilion features a dynamic installation of functional fragments that can be provided to other pavilions, thereby scattering the Dutch pavilion throughout the Biennale venue of Somerset House, creating new moments of interaction and collaboration for participants and visitors alike. 

At a time of rising nationalism and growing geopolitical instability, international cooperation has become more crucial than ever, but also, seemingly out of reach. By scattering and redistributing the Dutch pavilion, the expected routing of the Biennale—a site of global representation—is reorientated towards new anchor points that can foster discussions around the common interests and overlapping sympathies necessary to overcoming our increasingly fragmented world. 

Through a series of collaborative workshops, the design team of Fabulous Future, Studio Verter, Tim Teven Studio and Jeanine van Berkel have developed the pavilion’s scenography. Evoking an ambiguous bureaucratic environment, a nod to Somerset House’s former life as a collection of administrative spaces including Inland Revenue and the administrative headquarters of the Royal Navy, this layered history is used as a starting point for new collaborations and ideas. 

The space occupied by the Dutch pavilion will now facilitate the logistical processes necessary for other participants to borrow its component fragments. From a central desk, other pavilions can fill out the required paperwork to borrow the items for use in their own pavilions. 

London Design Biennale 2023 The Global Game: Remapping Collaborations 
The Biennale theme of The Global Game: Remapping Collaborations was set this year by the Nieuwe Instituut, led by its General and Artistic director Aric Chen. As Artistic Director for the 2023 London Design Biennale, Nieuwe Instituut has used the theme to experiment and challenge the traditional Biennale format of national and territorial pavilions by asking participants to collaborate with each other, facilitated by a web-based game, specially developed by Amsterdam practice Play the City.  

Founded in 2016 by Sir John Sorrell CBE and Ben Evans CBE, London Design Biennale is held annually at Somerset House and promotes international collaboration and the global role of design with exhibitions and installations that demonstrate the ambition to create universal solutions to problems which concern us all. 

Over the course of the Biennale, the Nieuwe Instituut will also organise an (inter)national working group in collaboration with The Creative Industries Fund NL to research the response to this year's collaborative theme and examine new ways of working for future events and exhibitions. 

Out of Joint is supported by the Embassy of the Netherlands in the United Kingdom.