Curated by Lesley Jackson, the exhibition was produced by Alice Cicolini in her role as Design & Architecture Project Manager for the British Council.
The exhibition demonstrates how profoundly British design has been enriched by immigration and by the internationalisation of education, business and cultural discourse. Further education accounts for a lot of the cultural influx, a question that is asked, is why do so many designers stay in Britain to pursue their careers, when this country offers neither a manufacturing sector that consistently supports designers, nor a particularly design-and innovation-friendly general public?
The catalogue text, accompanying the show, by the curator Lesley Jackson, gives some interesting answers to this question. Her interviews with each designer paint a picture of a country that, while having conservative and sceptical elements, promotes imaginative freedom, collaboration and interdisciplinary practice. The ability to ‘be oneself’ in spite of established roles and precedents is a repeated theme of the interviews. A general sense of the mixed-up, ‘jamming’ nature of the art and design communities is another motif. The risk of globalism to design is that bigger audiences and markets than ever before will breed a diffuse, homogenous set of forms and surfaces. But Import Export bears testimony to the opposite possibility: more intense and differentiated cultural hybrids in design.