"Blisko / Closeness" – Exhibition
Client
Fundacja Bochińskich
Year
August 2022
Deliverables
exhibition logo, font choice, object icons, wall description compositions
Timeline
3 months
The Concept
So close but so far apart
Blisko – "closeness" – was curated by polish designer Anna Siedlecka, invited for collaboration by the Bochińscy Foundation. Her subject was intimacy in modern relationships: how families and friends can still drift into alienation despite that technology promises to connect us instantly, across any distance.
We took that distance literally and pushed it outward, into space. The visual language grew from the space oriented motives appearing in modern media such as 'Alien Eight Passenger Nostromo' movie, 'No man's Sky' game or NASA visual idenityty.
About Exhibition
Design to go Concept
Blisko was one of three "box" exhibitions, each built inside a large wooden crate styled like a shipping box and presenting five Polish industrial-design objects, drawn from the past and the present.
Exhibition on the road
It was staged and first shown at Halo Kultura in Gdynia Poland, where the whole show was arranged for 3D scanning – 'Scan 3D" translated it into a digital version, now accessible through the Design to go site (dizajnnawynos.pl). From there it travelled on: to the first edition of Bydgoszcz Design Days in 2022, and later to Gdynia Design Days, as part of Fundacja Bochińskich's Studio Display.
Logo
variant 1 – accepted
In my search for the right mark I went in three directions. The first was chosen and built as a neon outside of the box; the other two stayed as proposals to the curator.
1 – Serifless and cleanly geometric, inspired by the NASA logo. This is the version we ran with and realized as the neon. To make it bespoke I edited the base type, Good Times – brought the letters close together and outlined them, tight enough that the strokes read as one connected line. The tight spacing and the almost unbroken outline both echo the exhibition's title, Blisko, closeness.
2 – A hand-drawn mark to underline more intimate aspect of exhibition's topic, with a rocket standing in for the "i" – skyrocketing up to introduce alienation.
3 – Inspired by the ring of Saturn hugging all the letters together.
The Icons Set
Each of the five objects has its own icon, so a visitor can tie a wall description straight to the piece in front of them.
I drew them in isometric for a more technical feel, and kept each one as an outline rather than a solid fill, so the set sits in the same family as the outlined logo. Every icon started from a photograph, passed through an isometric sketch, and settled into a clean outlined mark.
Urns Obwara – 2021 – Marlena Norowska
Font Selection
Both the wordmark and the wall descriptions used one typeface: Good Times. I went looking for something futuristic, close to NASA's typography – the show circled around distance and space, so that connotation was a natural place to start. In the descriptions the font is used as it comes, unmodified.
The descriptions themselves were Anna Siedlecka's idea. Gallery text is usually small and hard to read. As the descriptions were not only telling the metrics about the objects but also presented narrative of the exhibition the curator wanted them to be a part of the scenography. We decided on large wall height text compositions.
Live Exhibition
Skany 3D company scanned the exhibition and rebuilt it as a digital walkthrough, so Blisko stays open long after the box was packed away.
To digital exhibiton (PL) ->
The Organisators
The Cocreators
Curator: Anna Siedlecka
Film / trailer: Konrad Kulczyński
Animation: Grażyna Rigall
Exhibition scenography (set design): Anna Siedlecka
Scenography production: Bochińscy Foundation
Graphics and visual identity: Jakub Ryszard Koncewicz
Exhibition photography: Renata Dąbrowska
360° virtual tour: Michał Racław / Scan3D, Joanna Gembel / Scan3D
Content and research: Iwona Puzowska / F.Bo, Anna Siedlecka
360° tour supervision: Justyna Hys / Justyna Hys – Creative Studio
Podcast production: Olo Walicki
Text editing: Anna Kwiatkowska