Split Personality

Friedman Benda is pleased to present its seventh annual guest-curated exhibition Split Personality. Curated by Alice Stori Liechtenstein, independent curator and founder of Schloss Hollenegg for Design, the exhibition explores how functional objects undergo a process of mutation to acquire symbolic value, and thus develop split personalities that oscillate between their different identities. The works on display at Friedman Benda, ambiguously classifiable as chairs, tables, rugs, are meant as furniture of practical and comfortable nature. And yet, as the curator Alice Stori Liechtenstein puts it, “the personality and implicit meaning of these pieces are so assertive that they appear to be at odds with the function.” In the course of history, objects (and furniture in our specific case) were rarely valued and made purely for their function. They have always carried specific cultural, subjective or philosophical messages. Objects are used to characterize, communicate and develop our sense of self and construct our own identity. The idea that objects might have a split personality might help us to recognize the different identities they are capable of embodying, and acknowledge their power to be alternatively functional furniture or conveyors of meaning.