Ab Rogers Design (ARD) open their Stanley Picker Fellowship exhibition A Day in the Life of Ernesto Bones as part of the British Council programme at Beijing Design Week 2011.
Originally shown at the Stanley Picker Gallery in the spring, ARD’s narrative installation of the fictitious Ernesto Bones was inspired by objects from the real Picker House on Kingston Hill, and was made in close collaboration with students from Kingston University’s Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture.
Based on the Surrealist game Exquisite Corpse – invented in Paris in the 1930s – the story of a single day in the life of the character Ernesto Bones was created by twenty-four invited creative experts, including artist Charlotte Cullinan, chef Heston Blumenthal, Design Museum Director Deyan Sudjic, and the children’s illustrator Sara Fanelli amongst others.
In China the exhibition will be installed in the courtyard buildings of No. 7 Zhujia Hutong in the Dashilar area of Beijing, part of the historic region south of Tiananmen Square. A new fully illustrated book, in both Mandarin and English with an introduction by Gallery Director David Falkner, is published to accompany the exhibition.
ARD’s exhibition is accompanied at Beijing Design Week by What Design Can Do; a series of six giant banners, specially commissioned from the award winning UK design practice Johnson Banks. The banners, showcasing the power of design through Chinese and British collaborative practice, were created to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the MA Curating Contemporary Design course at Kingston University run in partnership with the Design Museum, London.