Jewellery collection highlights everyone's right to life-saving medicines
06 November 2019
Drug's unreachability is portrayed at the Nobel Museum
"As a designer, it is a privilege to contribute our professional skills to a project with Médecins Sans Frontières. It is rare to have the opportunity to work with such an important and concrete issue in a more abstract way," says Kourosh Hekmatara, form student at Beckmans.
Together with former design students Mira Bergh Edenborg, Matilda Ström Ellow and Julia Jondell, he has created a collection of luxury jewellery; three necklaces, three pairs of earrings, a hair buckle and a ring, all cast in tin and in product design of medicines. The jewellery will be displayed in November in an installation at the Nobel Museum.
"With the assignment, we began to reflect on what access to medicines looked like during our lives, here in Sweden. There are medicines around the corner or even across the street, and this is seen as a matter of course. Our installation visually portrays how inaccessible many kinds of medicines still are for poor people around the world.
Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Médecins Sans Frontières in 1999
This year is 20 years since Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for its humanitarian efforts around the world. For the prize money, the organization started the so-called Access campaign for everyone's right to life-saving medicines. Since then, MSF has worked under the slogan "medicine should not be a luxury" to improve access to medicines, vaccines and diagnostic tools.
"In connection with the anniversary, we wanted to find a creative way to convey how high drug prices still prevent millions of people from accessing life-changing treatment. We therefore commissioned Beckman's alumni to portray this out-of-reach visually," says Oliver Schulz, Secretary General of Médecins Sans Frontières( MSF).
