Insuring a new connection with animals: Tanja Seiner's PET MARKET attracted crowds when exhibited at Galerie Erstererster on Pappelallee in East Berlin.
Never before have pets played such an important role in our society: in Germany pets are kept in approximately 15 million households; in the US, there are now more households with pets than there are with children....Pets always have to be integrated into the environment of humans: into their apartment, their social life, their daily routine. But how far should the adaptation of animals to the world of humans be pushed - and how can the man-made environment adapt itself towards the needs of their pets?
Tanja Seiner, PET MARKET founder
It is a fact of daily living that pet supplies analogous to the human products are everywhere. As Seiner reminds us, a pet can now have its own tableware, clothing, jewelry, furniture and toiletries that are forever adapting to the fashionable trends of homo sapiens.
Considering our household companions even have their own Pet Insurance...so why not have their very own Pet Market as well?
Reinterpreting lighting for your pet: "CATLIGHTS" by Silvia Knüppel, 2015, through the window of PET MARKET designs for pets & humans in Berlin.
How much do we project onto our own pets? What insurance do we give them that they will have healthy and happy lives? Do pets dream the same things we do?
Tanja Seiner, a designer and curator based in Munich, has been asking these questions. Her inquiry resulted in PET MARKET emerging from her design seminar at the School of Arts and Design Kassel. Inspired by her student works, Tanja asked established designers and artists to design products for pets & humans and these were presented for the first time in the summer of 2015 at PET MARKET Berlin.
Since these 21 inventive designs crossed my radar sceen as the season of giving got underway, I thought it precipitious to post them as a holiday gift to myself and readers, a departure from the usual cutting edge art aimed strictly through and at homo sapiens that typically prompts my eye to keyboard.
Tanja Seiner's PET MARKET happens to be an inventive cutting edge design project as well as a crowd pleaser. The designs are intended to shake up the viewer and provide new interpretations of how we live with and house our pets. As Seiner says: "It poses the question, what living conditions we provide for us and our fellow creatures."
When PET MARKET project arrived in Berlin this past summer, the attention it attracted from passerbys served to highlight the shift in the raw East Berlin arts scene arising after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Indeed, the opening event took place parallel to the International Design Festival Berlin (DMY) and the Make City Festival for architecture and urban alternatives
Increasingly more arts spaces are changing to design spaces as gentrification enters a new phase that New Yorkers are familiar with...the boutique phase before the national brands move in. Yet, this being Berlin, there is less danger of this...and more time to enjoy the diversity.
"PET MARKET explores the complex and diverse relationships between pets and humans from a design perspective, and provides suggestions and outlooks how design can respond to the requirements of their shared living spaces," says project creator Tanja Seiner.
PET MARKET designer pet supplies are delightfully ambiguous: part serious/part tongue in cheek invitation for the pet that has everything, even pet insurance, to try out some of these edgy designs.
"Open Cage" by Dominik Hehl, 2015 (Photo credit: Dominik Hehl).
So, this is my Holiday Gift to my readers, for your pet that is well fed, worked out and insured of a happy and healthy life, there are some new and unique ideas to cause you to question your relationship with your pets, as well as an integral design for living...
"Rodent Run" by Nathalie Indra, 2015 (Photo credit: Nathalie Indra).
...by means of enticing images that inspire your own pet creations!
Connecting pet with owner via the doppleganger leash: "Doppelleine 2/Double Collar Leash" by Christof Flötotto and Sven Funcke, 2015 (Photo Credit: Christof Flötotto and Sven Funcke).
"Brioche" by Corinna Seeger, 2015 (Photo credit: Anja Kohne).
"Bones" by Volker Albus (Photo credit: Schmidt Bildde)
A VERY HAPPY HOLIDAY, MY DEAR READER, TO YOU AND YOUR PET!
See more designs at www.petmarket.world
All installation views and products, unless otherwise noted, are credited ANJA KÖHNE and published with the permission of PET MARKET founder Tanja Seiner.
Lisa Paul Streitfeld is a cultural critic based in Berlin who has had an amazing variety of pets in her life.