Bina Baitel: Putting One’s Head Over The Parapet
(Adam Štěch) Designer and architect Bina Baitel has created an original collection of lights for the Next Level gallery in Paris on the occasion of her first solo exhibition, entitled Under My Skin. The experimental form and conceptual meanings of these lights will definitely get under one’s skin.
Bina Baitel is of French-Israeli-Swedish origin. She is not afraid of experimenting despite her multicultural background and has designed her most compact and extensive collection of lights for the avant-garde Next Level gallery, which focuses on producing limited designer pieces. The Under My Skin exhibition displays light objects that play primarily with materials and their qualities, which become the key component of the artistic intention based on conceptual transpositions and games. The Pull Over floor lamp and the Aurelie table lamp, which were designed earlier and included into the gallery’s production, are tactile light objects in which the body, the shade, and the light source become a single compact body made from soft silicone combined with optical fibres. The lamp is black and solid on the outside and emits a transparent light from the inside. It can be rolled like a sleeve from the top and thus the user can achieve an arbitrarily large light surface.
The Harebell, Snug, and Pad floor and contour lamps are an integral part of the exhibition. The Harebell lamp combines traditional saddlery and leather-making in its form with luminous optical fibres and silicone. The Snug and the Pad lamps are the highlights of the entire exhibition. They pour out into a space like spilled milk; they are leather objects that combine the light source with the function of a carpet or a mat. The designer says she has managed, in her two latest light projects, to create so-called mutant objects that combine two functions in one spectacular object.
