The emograms of Ball.Room., which were exhibited at the Gwangju Design Biennial in South-Korea last September and which received a huge international media coverage will be displayed at Incheon from the middle of January. An interactive installation incorporated into a precise system, with Miklós Kiss’s usual conceptual approach.
Miklós Kiss’s basic concept built on emojis, emoticons and smileys was realized already back in 2016, at the exhibition organized in the small pavilion in front of Design Terminál (headquartered at Erzsébet tér back then). Colon, dash, parenthesis and many variations in a yellow circle or on the surface of a three-dimensional sphere. Ball.Room., referring to the name of Harvey Ball, the person inventing the regular participants of our chats that are many times substituting words and the description of our feelings in sentences, aka the emojis, brings impersonal phone communication “back to life”: they became palpable and they build relationships.
“In 2015, Oxford Dictionaries chose an emoji as the word of the year. This is what caught my interest in the first place, actually. I found the process of how we started written communication with drawings, then by continuously simplifying them we created letters and the different characters, and then we created pictograms out of them once again through phone and computer communication over time, as a circle, which we made part of our everyday lives. I placed the lost letters and words back into the emojis. This is how the so-called emograms were born” – Miklós told us.
In the biggest design fair of South Korea, the Gwangju Design Biennial, the priority theme was “Human behavior in the digital era” last September. Miklós debuted here with his reimagined and interactive Ball.Room. installation, where the inflatable and large versions of the emograms developed and created by him were presented in a separate little room, in the main pavilion of the Biennial, where he exhibited his works together with three other artists. “What emotion do you feel today?” – the show perfectly combining the elements of art, graphic design and typography started off with this question. There were adhesive emotion-stickers and by getting into contact with each other, the visitors could express their feelings with the help of the large balls. It is no surprise that the exhibition became wildly popular, owing to Miklós’ novel approach, for sure, but also to the exigent and professional implementation.
“Several design and art sites wrote about the event, it received quite big media coverage internationally, which must have contributed to the fact that the leading curators of Gwangju Design Biennial and LOTTE gallery contacted me to offer the opportunity of a solo exhibition. After the Goldenroach Unlimited exhibition showcased in Budapest Hall of Art, Ball.Room. opened in the gallery in Incheon in January is my second solo show. I have further developed my emograms for this occasion compared to the Biennial: they are much nicer and face-like now and so they also became much more lovable. 7 new emograms can be seen at the exhibition in different forms – there are 60 cm diameter pins, sphere statues of 40 cm diameter made out of acryl, a new installation of mine will also debut here, the LOVE field and my first typography-based statue, too” – Miklós told us.
Since the opening, more than 9000 people visited the exhibition organized in Incheon, which will be open until February 23. In the meantime, Miklós is already working on his next project, in addition to his branding projects launching in the next weeks – the machine is running, but in this case, the creator never rests…
Photos: Eszter Sára Cseh
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