Alexandra Midal

Professor at the Master Space & Communication at HEAD – Genève (HES-SO), Alexandra Midal is an art and design historian who combines a practice & theory-based research as an artist-curator and film essayist.

She is the author of The Murder Factory (Sternberg Press, 2023); Design by Accident: For a New History of Design (Sternberg Press, 2019), among many others books, catalogues and essays. Her next books to be published are Dancing Girls, Hypnotic Fascism and Subliminal at the Edge: Beetween Knowledge and Mind Control (Empire) 

Before to be the guest curator of BIO28, Ljubljana Design Biennial with Double Agent: Do You Speak Flowers?, she has curated a number of international exhibitions about visual culture, design, visual arts and politic: Top Secret, Cinémathèque Française, Paris & La Caixa, (2021-2025); Popcorn-Art, Design et Cinéma, MAMC, (2017); Eames & Hollywood, Adam, (2016); Politique-Fiction, Cité du design, (2012), Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, Wolfsonian FIU, (2012); Tomorrow Now: When Design Meets Science Fiction, MUDAM, (2007), etc.

She was the Director of the Design Project Room in Geneva where she exhibited solo shows of Marguerite Humeau, Superstudio, El Ultimo Grito, Carlo Mollino, etc. after directing the FRAC Haute-Normandie. 

She has exhibited her films in Drive In, (solo show) at CAPC, Museum of Contemporary Art, Bordeaux, France (2018-2019) and in Au Bonheur, (cur. by Alice Motard et Joel Riff), CEEAC, Strasbourg, France. (2022-2023). Her films: Shake, Shake, Shakers; Heaven is a State of Mind; Mind Player; Possessed; Home Sweet Ho(l)me(s); Domestic Psycho; Hocus Pocus: Twilight in My Mind; Politique-Fiction; Eames, An Atlas; Villa Frankenstein,… are screened in museums worldwide.

LECTURE

Do You Speak Flower? 

explores the association of individuals, focusing on woman, and flowery ornaments, to show how the strategic, beneficial and vital importance of pretence and visual simulacra in design, cinema and the visual arts has prompted astonishing works of camouflage in the art. Since the Victorian era to Ray and Charles Eames design, and from FormaFantasma/Joanna Piotrowska Sub Rosa to Rosa Luxemburg’s prison’s herbarium, as Miley Cirus who “can buy (her)self flowers”, subtle yet powerful flower language can convey hidden signification to avoid detection. Double Agent: Do You Speak Flower? is the topic of the last design Biennial of Ljubljana (2024-2025)