When Niklas Bildstein Zaar discovered that his structure studio, Sub, had been employed to design the primary present at this 12 months’s Venice Structure Biennale, he knew it was an odd selection. Previously decade, his Berlin-based agency has made a reputation for itself designing elaborate stage units, for rappers like Travis Scott and Ye, and for Balenciaga’s buzzy style reveals.
Alongside the way in which, the agency has helped set up an austere postindustrial visible language that has develop into pervasive on-line: apocalyptic however shiny, with darkish colours and loads of concrete. “Our palette got here from worlds the place some counterculture had manifested itself,” Bildstein Zaar stated in an interview. “We’re working with supplies which have a sort of angle.”
On a latest go to to the agency’s studio, within the Tiergarten district of Berlin, the décor was a funereal mix of goth and high-tech. Work in shades of black and grey held on the partitions, and a daunting rubber masks adorned a counter. In Bildstein Zaar’s workplace, a sculpture of a Grim Reaper-like determine sat ominously in a nook.
For the Venice job, Sub is having to reinvent its strategy for a much less flashy context. The Biennale, which opens on May 10, is the world’s most prestigious structure exhibition, and Bildstein Zaar stated he hoped his agency’s expertise in style and artwork would make the occasion interesting to a brand new sort of customer. “If it managed to decorate itself barely totally different,” Bildstein Zaar stated, “it might get a a lot larger viewers.”
Like its artwork counterpart, which happened final 12 months, the Venice Structure Biennale includes a large-scale central exhibition, plus particular person pavilions that exhibiting nations manage individually. For the primary present, Sub has designed a system for presenting the displays, which have been chosen individually by the occasion’s curatorial group, and for guiding guests by way of the present.
