Press release -
Museum of Modern Art shows architectural solutions that can help meet the needs of the global refugee crisis - Better Shelter in focus
The New York-based Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) exhibition Insecurities: Tracing Displacement and Shelter presents solutions in architecture, design and art that can meet the needs arising as a result of the global refugee situation. The exhibition features Better Shelter, from Sweden.
The UN estimates that over 67 million people are currently either refugees or seeking asylum. The displacement of millions of people throughout the Middle East, North Africa and Europe has led to permanent refugee camps in places that have never seen such things before, like Dunkirk in France and Lesbos in Greece. Supposedly temporary refugee camps intended for emergency needs have become a home to thousands of families for years and sometimes generations – creating new vulnerabilities.
MoMA’s forthcoming Insecurities exhibition brings attention to these vulnerabilities, but also shows how modern architecture, art and design are responding to the challenge. Better Shelter’s emergency shelter is one of the innovations featured in the exhibition.
- We won’t solve the global refugee situation with our accommodation solution, but we can make life easier for people who have been forced to flee their homes by offering them a safer temporary home. Unlike the thin, fragile tents available in many refugee camps today, the Better Shelter has hard walls, lockable door and a solar-powered lamp, says Johan Karlsson, interim Managing Director of Better Shelter.
The exhibition runs from 1 October 2016 to 22 January 2017.
Topics
- Design
Categories
- design
- ikea foundation
- innovation
- refugee camp
- refugees
- shelter
- unhcr
- museum of modern art
- moma
- better shelter
About the exhibition
Insecurities has been arranged by Sean Anderson, Associate Curator, and Ariele Dionne-Krosnick, Curatorial Assistant of the Department of Architecture and Design at The Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition is part of Citizens and Borders, a series of separate projects at MoMA which offer a critical perspective of the conventional story of refugees, migration and borders. Support for the exhibition is provided by The International Council of The Museum of Modern Art. Read more at http://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1653?locale=en.
About Better Shelter
Better Shelter is a social enterprise that develops and provides innovative housing solutions for people displaced from their home by armed conflicts and natural disasters. Through clever design, innovation and modern technology Better Shelter works to create safer and more dignified emergency shelters, which offer temporary homes to millions of people worldwide. The Better Shelter unit has been developed through groundbreaking collaboration between Better Shelter and its partners the IKEA Foundation and the UN refugee agency, UNHCR. Read more at Better Shelter, IKEA Foundation and UNHCR.
