‘Designing the Middle East: Part 1’ (28 March – 17 May 2013) is the first in a two-part exhibition series presented by Soho design gallery, 19 Greek Street. It will showcase, for the first time in the UK, the work of Tel Aviv designers Noam Dover and Michal Cederbaum, alongside their longterm collaborator, the London based Israeli designer Yoav Reches. The exhibition will also include several works by senior Israeli designers, invited by the exhibitors in order to foster an additional dialogue between the displayed works.
Curated by 19 Greek Street owner and creative director Marc Péridis, ‘Designing the Middle
East: Part 1’ acts as a tribute to the passion, courage and love that exist alongside the terrible
conflict that divides this area of the world.
The exhibition will explore how contemporary design can respond to a reality marked by
conflict and division. It will present an exploration of creative processes within a local context:
how do the characteristics of a place influence our use of tools and materials, and what visual
forms come out of these choices? This perspective demonstrates a unique link between design,
craft and production, formulating a distinctive nature of design and fabrication.
Works such as ‘Saj Tables,’ constructed from the spun steel domes used for making pita bread,
and ‘Concrete,’ vases that explore the relationship between fragility and mass fabricated from a
material not normally associated with craft, highlight this continued questioning of the creative
process and the materials used.
The work by Noam Dover and Michal Cederbaum can be seen to merge the traditions of
craftsmanship with technology, while frequently confusing this relationship. ‘Scan & Scale’
perfectly illustrates this by taking nature, in this case a pebble, as a starting point and recreating
it through computer-aided design via CNC technology. In doing so they seek to stretch the
boundaries of various technologies.
Yoav Reches’ ‘Composition of Air’ celebrates the diversity of and delicate composition of that
most everyday and omnipresent item that surrounds us, namely the air that we breathe. A
collection of ten glass vessels represent the ten most common gases found in the composition of
air and are colour coded according to their industrial charts.

Featuring Tel Aviv designers
Studio Noam Dover and Michal Cederbaum
in collaboration with Yoav Reches
28th March – 17th May 2013
www.19greekstreet.com