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Inbal Strauss is a practice-led researcher based in London

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BDes (Bezalel), MFA (Goldsmiths), DPhil (Oxford)

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Trained as a product designer and subsequently, as a sculptor, Inbal questions the traditional distinction between art and design, which hinges on how closely the mode of production adheres to the modernist dictum 'form follows function'.

 

Accordingly, her studio practice explores questions of functionality, instrumentality, and artefactual agency. It asks: how might contemporary art prompt, twist, or accentuate a notion of function that goes beyond the notion of utility?

 

Her objects, which play with the language of everyday objects yet are presented within a fine art exhibition setting, are designed to have no use-value, only ‘useless-value’. Straddling both registers, the quasi-functional objects resist neat subsumption either into the category of ‘art’ or that of ‘design’, consequently urging their re-evaluation

and negotiating the binary oppositions between usefulness and uselessness, utility and futility.