TYPE/LIFE EXHIBITION
A Forrest of Floating Typography
Time: December 21 – 28, 2010
Opening: Tuesday, December 21, 6 – 8 pm
Location: GRAD – European Center for Culture and Debate, Belgrade, Serbia

Four designers — Nancy Froehlich, Nadra Moritz, Zvezdana Stojmirovic and Azin Valy — present Type/Life, a participatory installation about the shifting meaning of language. They have expressed dualities of modern life in pairs of words printed on large floating balloons, in a dreamscape for interaction and reflection. Visitors can contribute by drawing their own lettering on blank balloons.

A quote from the designers:

"Native/other, show/hide, before/after, and enter/return — these words cluster around you, triggering your personal reflection. They touch on our biographies, where belonging and exclusion are braided around the various migrations of our lives. At the outset of the 21. century, however, we find the biggest migration of all to be mankind's move to cyberspace. With its promise to connect, technology has also separated us from ourselves, our pasts and from each other. Innocence, lost in a world of digitization and scrutiny, is reclaimed in our installation.
With Type/Life, we ask you to get physical with language. Take a ride on the swings, back and forth across a typographic border on the floor. Shift your perspective. Consider your own lexicon of dualities. You may want to draw them on your own balloon and let it become part of the work. We invite you to wonder, reflect, engage and contribute."

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Nancy Froehlich (Born USA, 1977) is a photographer and graphic designer. She teaches graphic design at Oregon State University, in Corvallis, Oregon, USA. She recently completed her second stint in Vandh, a small village near Bhuj, India, teaching design basics to native craftswomen.graysignal.com

Nadra Moritz (Born USA, 1976), a graphic designer, lives and works in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Her cultural complexity — Algerian-American-French, Indonesian, Austrian and Dutch — never ceases to amaze us. chiwi.com

Zvezdana Stojmirovic (Born China, 1970) teaches graphic design at MICA in Baltimore, Maryland, USA, and is always on the lookout for ways to return to Belgrade, her hometown, as often as possible. Designing for Participatory Culture, her forthcoming book, co-authored with Helen Armstrong, is due out Fall 2011. zvezdana.stojmirovic.org