The Face of God

The exhibition The Face of God could be described as a novel in spatial form. Both the main character and the story are fictional, staged in the room through objects, environments, images and texts created specifically for the exhibition.

The exhibition and the accompanying book are the result of Form Follows Fiction, a research project at the School of Design and Craft (HDK) at the University of Gothenburg. The aim of the project is to explore practically the relationship between fiction and fact, art and science, history and contemporary times, as well as text and objects.

The conceptual starting point of the project is to investigate what role fiction can play as a driving force in the designer's design work. A general idea of work as a designer is that it consists in solving a problem in form and execution (form follows function). For this exhibition, the objects have instead been created based on a fictional story (form follows fiction). Fiction here becomes a tool for freely developing design objects and accentuating their narrative qualities. The aim is thus to shift the focus from looking at design as a problem-solving practice to highlighting its meaning-making aspects.

The concrete starting point of the project is exhibitions about historical figures as a genre. Exhibitions of that nature, of necessity, mix facts with suppositions. The stories conveyed also often borrow the character of the fiction to engage the audience. In The Face of God, the project's participants have gone one step further and created a completely fictional historical figure.

Of particular importance for the project is the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges and the play between fact and fiction that came to be expressed in his literary output. Artistically, The Face of God fits into a tradition that ranges from contemporary designers, artists and projects such as Dunne & Raby, Maywa Denki, Musée Patamécanique, Walid Raad's The Atlas Group, Museum of Jurassic Technology, Bonk Business Inc and Hokes Archives to historical antecedents such as Jacques Carelman's Catalogue d'objets introuvables. These projects all draw their nourishment from the tension between fact and fiction, between the discursive and the intuitive, between an artistic and a more curatorial approach.
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^{Photo: Håkan Jutblad}