DS+R Designed Exhibition Exploring Modernity in Paris from 1914-1945 to Open at Power Station of Art
From July 22 to October 20, 2023, the Power Station of Art will present Paris Moderne 1914-1945: Architecture, Design, Film, Fashion, a retrospective of the emergence and prosperity of modernity in Paris during the Golden Age from a richly interwoven perspective. The exhibition is curated by renowned architectural historian Jean-Louis Cohen, with the architect Pascal Mory, and Catherine Örmen for the fashion section. The exhibition is designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R), while Jumping He is the graphic designer.
The exhibition will showcase more than 300 objects including architectural models, drawings, paintings, jewels, photographs, films, and garments, as well as new digital animations created by DS+R. From the intimate scale of interiors to vast urban landscapes, from jewels and clothes to cinematographic images, the exhibition will present thirty years of passion and invention. DS+R deployed various forms of technology—video projections, lighting effects, and immersive multi-screen film environments—to create imagined, atmospheric scenes that evoke the “moveable feast” of Parisian urban life in the last century.
Between the two world wars, in the wake of France's victory over Germany, Paris reached the pinnacle of its influence on the country, Europe, and the world. The sprawling city became a laboratory of modern technology and culture. The city's industrial fabric underwent a fundamental transformation, as it embraced the new doctrines of Taylorism and Fordism. Both cinema and fashion revealed the aspirations of the new urban bourgeoisie and set the stage for modern dreams. Based on the achievements of industry and drawing on the many resources of luxury craftsmanship, new spatial and visual strategies emerged. Building programs encouraged major changes in architecture, interior design and urban planning, artists and designers explored new languages. The mysteries and myths of Paris were explored by photographers and filmmakers and transpired in the writings of novelists and scholars. Paris was home to intellectuals from all over Europe and the world—Russian emigres, American writers, Hungarian photographers, and German philosophers found fertile ground for their creativity in its cafés and salons. The period between 1914 and 1945, will be considered not as a sterile parenthesis but as a period of intense creativity.
Framing the modern city as an example, the exhibition will also present diverse historical references for studies on modernism in Shanghai. The 1920s and 1930s were a period of rapid development for Shanghai, the major trading port in the Far East. Urban culture was nurtured by the industrialization and modernization of the city. At that time, Shanghai was known as the “Oriental Paris,” rather than being an oriental mirror image of Paris, it was a manifesto of the city in the changing times of China. Paris Moderne 1914-1945: Architecture, Design, Film, Fashion will again share with its Chinese audience the diversity of modernism, and the contribution of the humanities and the arts to a city’s historical transformation, after the exhibition Ordinary Metropolis — Shanghai: a Model of Urbanism (2016).