Exhibition: Waste Age

Waste Age: What can design do?

Runs until: Sun 23 Feb 2025

Price: Pay what you choose
All ages welcome

Venue: Mac, Birmingham.
First Floor, Made at MAC, Terrace and Arena Galleries

Opening Times: 11am - 5pm

Find out more and book your ticket:
Waste Age: What can design do? | Midlands Arts Centre

Waste Age: What can design do? is a group exhibition focused on a new generation of designers who are rethinking our relationship to everyday things. From fashion to food, electronics to construction, even packaging - finding the lost value in our trash and imagining a future of clean materials and a circular economy could point the way out of the Waste Age.

The exhibition tells the story of the environmental crisis and marks MAC’s first collaboration with the Design Museum to highlight the current crisis and design’s role in the problem. It also explores how design can transform our waste into valuable resources, promote new ways of living with the Earth and not from it, and where there is no such thing as waste. Divided into three topics, this exhibition explores what lies beyond our current toxic waste infrastructures, exploring the environmental, social, and geopolitical forces at work.

Visitors will be immersed in the waste crisis before being shown the transformative potential of new design approaches that are redefining fashion, construction, food, electronics or packaging and the new materials that will help shape a cleaner future.

This is an exhibition that not only seeks to imagine alternative futures, but one that empowers the visitor to be part of the solution.

The exhibition will feature a new sculptural commission inspired by clothes waste markets in Nigeria by Birmingham-based artist Abdulrazaq Awofeso.

Waste Age is a touring exhibition by the Design Museum, London and curated by Gemma Curtin and Justin McGuirk. MAC is the only tour venue in the UK.

#EndTheWasteAge

Waste Age graphic by SPIN.

MAC would like to thank Eversheds Sutherland, headline sponsor of Waste Age.
MAC is grateful for a generous anonymous donation towards the exhibition. With thanks to Arts Council England and players of People's Postcode Lottery.