Later this month Danish designer Nina Tolstrup of Studiomama will be exhibiting a collection of furniture pieces made from reclaimed pallets. Aside from the obvious sustainable connection, the social aspects of the project are built in rather than added on.

You can buy pieces of the Pallet Collection pre-made, but with the assembly guidelines also sold online, the furniture can be recreated from your local pallet source. And giving further flesh to the project, Tolstrup allowed photographer and gallerist Cecilia Glik to teach unemployed workers in the Lugano district of Buenos Aires how to make the furniture, which is then sold through local networks or globally online.

The show in London takes place during the London Design Festival and will include a set of limited edition pallet chairs by British artists Gavin Turk and Cornelia Parker, which will be auctioned on the Studiomama website with proceeds going directly to the community project in Buenos Aires.

This exhibition aims to investigate the borders between fashion and art, acknowledging the way in which today’s fashion designers use installations and performances, and the increasingly sculptural qualities of their work. At the heart of the show are exclusive new works by five top international designers. Invited by the H+F Fashion on the Edge Foundation, Viktor & Rolf, Naomi Filmer, Hussein Chalayan, Anna-Nicole Ziesche and Walter Van Beirendonck, embody an interface between fashion and art that abandons the principle of a wearable collection and seeks out new boundaries of fashion. Alongside these five showpieces, the exhibition presents the work of a further 25 international artists and fashion designers.

Over nearly two centuries of luxury goods have come from the Belgian house of Delvaux, and this exhibition charts the twists and turns in its creative development from the first Brussels workshop in 1829 to the influence of its most recent artistic director, Veronique Branquinho. According to curator, Hettie Judah, ‘Delvaux was created at a time when travelling for pleasure was a luxury reserved for the very few; within the space of a few decades, the company was catering to business travellers on the first continental railways, and Red Star Line tourists cruising out of Antwerp to New York. As well as examining the evolution of luggage in this historical context, we have also looked into the company’s creative history, showing the stylistic developments made by designers behind the scenes over the last century and examining the complex process that goes into designing and making a bag today.’

It’s top-down and bottom’s-up at Stroom Den Haag from the middle of September. Soft City features the work of Azra Aksamija (1976, Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzeoginva), Pushwagner (1940, Oslo, Norway) and Dubravka Sekulić (1980, Nis Serbia), giving three artists’ depictions of the ‘mental, psychological and socio-economic effects of how people are organising or are being organised.’

Hariton Pushwagner’s pictorial novel Soft City (1969-1975) is the obvious title-bearer of the exhibition, proving that an Orwellian dystopian sensibility is still as unsettling as it sounds.

Aksamija’s current research explores the various ways in which layers of history have to define the architecture of contemporary mosques in Bosnia-Herzegovina, at Stroom she will be showing Arizona Road (2002), her installation inspired by observations of Arizona Market, the largest black market in the Balkans, and a brand- new work, Contraption (2009).

Architect/researcher Sekuli shows parts of Belgrade, Belgrade: Ongoing Archive of Unruled Practices' a project mapping informal transformation processes in Belgrade.

Exhibition Acknowledgements: Mondriaan Stichting, Generali Foundation Wien, Stimuleringsfonds voor Architectuur, Foundation Design Den Haag 2010-2018.

A welcome revisit to a dual masterpiece, this exhibition is dedicated to Italian photographer Guido Guidi’s decade-spanning visual essay of Carlo Scarpa’s Tomba Brion in Italy. Capturing Scarpa’s notions of time, space and light in the Brion family mausoleum, Guidi was a long-time admirer of Scarpa’s work and thought. Here his 54 colour photographs reveal the detailed beauty of the funerary complex, echoing the poetic qualities of his subject and its ability shift perspective depending on the time of day, season and the observer’s viewpoint. 

Taking place in several venues in Lyon city and its suburban areas, the Biennial will present works by about 60 international artists. Structured as a multi-dimensional system that reflects both intellectually and physically the event’s central thesis – the Spectacle of the Everyday –, there will be four chapters and a special section. These include The Magic of Things, or the reinvention of the everyday; Living Together, which turns the Lyon’s Museum of Contemporary Art into an open platform, and Veduta, where several artists will be invited to reside in the suburban areas with a large immigrant population and produce new, collaborative works.

The work of German photographer Peter Granser can be seen in various group and solo show in the coming few months.

Hidden Places, Kaune Sudendorf  - Gallery for Contemporary Photography, Cologne, Germany, from 5 Sep – 24 Oct.
Group exhibition with work of Katja Stuke, Oliver Sieber, Marina Gadonneix, Stefan Heyne, Greg Stimac, Jason Lazarus and of course, Peter Granser
www.ks-contemporary.com

Alzheimer, solo show at the Kunstzeughaus Rapperswil, Switzerland, from 18 Sep – 1 Nov
www.kunstzeughaus.ch

Germay and China – Together in Motion, Wuhan Museum of Art and The Art Museum of Hubei Academy of Fine Arts, China, from 20 Sep – 30 Oct.
Group exhibition of Chinese and German contemporary art, which includes Granser’s SIGNS project.
www.whmuseum.cn

From Memory, Dr. Guislain Museum, Ghent, Belgium, from 10 Oct – 2 May 2010.
Group show that deals with the fascination for memory in the worlds of art and science.
www.museumdrguislain.be

Now! design à vivre is the place to see the work of talented young designers at the September outing of MAISON&OBJET, which should be another good barometer to see how the design industry is responding to the current market climate. With various shows making up the event, attention for the trade is not only on decoration & objects for the home & contract sectors, but also design for outdoor spaces. The various events each have a creator of 2009, with MAISON&OBJET, MEUBLE PARIS, scènes d’intérieur and now! design à vivre respectively celebrating Karl Lagerfeld, François Azambourg, Vincent Van Duysen and Jean-Marie Massaud.

Half-naked women, gore and monsters have long been a formula for getting people to go to the cinema, and like some of its subject matter rising from the dead, Berlin's Bongout Gallery is resurrecting its exhibition of movie posters from Ghana.

Hand-painted pulp used to promote the country’s travelling cinemas (think man with a VCR, generator and car) since the 1980s, from big-budget Hollywood to debuts from African filmmakers, local artists would paint on old flour sacks that had been stitched together. It appears that seeing the movie was not so important for the people that made the posters, after all, why subject yourself to Bruce Willis when you have imagination and a film still.

Bongout is also publishing Ghanavision, an extended edition of last year’s Ghana Move Posters. Texts in German, English and French, the book documents the collections of Dr. W. Stäbler and Bongout.

This show features the ongoing urban research project of the urbanist, theorist and activist Kyong Park, carried out through different journeys along the intricate route between Istanbul and Tokyo. Examining the complex conditions and relations shaping the cultural, social and political territories throughout the Asian continent, Eurasia and the Middle East, this is what Park describes as The New Silk Roads. So far Park has carried out three expeditions, and he and his team of collaborators have visited and researched eight of the 20 countries that will involve the project, using the urban research method Park calls ‘nomadic practice’.