A Body of Work starts from the extensive collection acquired by the Brno Biennial over the years - or, to be more precise, from the illustrations representing those objects in the catalogues that have documented each biennial. Browsing through this material, it appears somehow flattened; serial; out of context and with its origins obscured - in a way equivalent to images on an instagram account or a tumblr page - yet the details of the designs still speak to us. That friction between the flat and vivid is fascinating. But what do these decisive details reveal of the origin in a thinking process? We decided to use the details to begin an examination of our own respective practices, clashing the material from the biennial's archive with our own work, ultimately asking questions about the kind of decisions we make as designers: on a formal level; on a conceptual level, and in response to the social, cultural, economical and technological conditions of our times.
As part of the International Exhibition: Student Work the International Jury of the 26th Brno Biennial 2014 awarded an Honourable Mention to the Dutch school of graphic design Werkplaats Typografie for works by four of its graduates. Goda Budvytytė, Ines Cox, Anna Haas and Corina Neuenschwander were invited to prepare an exhibition for the 27th Brno Biennial which will reflect their subjective view of contemporary graphic design, and the starting point of which will be the extensive set of acquisitions, gathered from the very beginning of the Brno Biennial in the 1960s for the graphic design collection of the Moravian Gallery in Brno.
