KIOSK HELLO

Next Mini, num­ber 6, is Lau­ren and Con­stan­tin Boym who put together an exhi­bi­tion of 21 Soviet things that they will show here at KIOSK Novem­ber 7th to the 16th. Open­ing party on the 7th 7-9pm.

These are things that you likely have never seen and many of which never made it out of the Com­mu­nist State alive. Long for­got­ten in their home­land,  they are sim­ply amaz­ing and beau­ti­ful:  the essence of KIOSK and the every­day object.

Con­stan­tin on the sub­ject says:

“Soviet con­sumer prod­ucts always reminded me of weeds. Cheap, often inde­struc­tible, noto­ri­ous for their clunky robust look, they pro­lif­er­ated in great num­bers at all lev­els of Soviet soci­ety. Like the Soviet State itself, it seemed they were des­tined to live for­ever. Once Rus­sia turned cap­i­tal­ist in the early 1990s, it was only a mat­ter of time before “the weeds” got cleared out. Presently, most prod­ucts in this show are extinct, or at least endan­gered; per­haps they still could be found on flea mar­kets, far in the provinces. We picked them at ran­dom dur­ing our early vis­its to Rus­sia, dri­ven, in part, by col­lec­tors’ instinct, in part – by a desire to amuse our Amer­i­can design col­leagues. Today, these prod­ucts may still amuse some­one, but their unpre­ten­tious sim­plic­ity can also teach us a few design lessons. Even­tu­ally, they will pass into the realm of his­tor­i­cal arti­facts. As years go by, they remain mate­r­ial wit­nesses to a very strange way of life, my life back in the USSR.”

For some nice soviet flash­back from your­tub, get your head­phones on and watch this (and watch out for NSA/CIA/ETC!): Remem­ber, it was not fun over there, back then! At all! Even if it looked and sounded that way!