Cologne 2011: designer Mike Meiré invited visitors to a fetish club furnished with customised design classics at his Cologne factory during the imm cologne trade fair last week

At the end of a winding corridor visitors found chairs by designers including Marcel Breuer and Eileen Gray, draped with chains, straps, surveillance equipment and masks, intended to contrast with the trade fair's sleek product presentations.

imm cologne took place 18-23 January. See all the stories about the event in our special category.

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The information that follows is from Mike Meiré:

As part of the Passagen for the imm cologne furniture trade fair, Mike Meiré presents his installation "Back Room - adults only" in his Factory in Cologne Ehrenfeld.

The exhibition confronts us with the bewildering notion that furniture could have its own life, a dark alter-ego that questions the supposed certainties of marketing and the design staples of the good, the beautiful and the true which the trade fair presents year after year with great pomp and circumstance.

Mike Meiré transforms his Cologne Factory into a difficult to access back room which can only be reached along a labyrinthine corridor.

The spatial deconstruction of the corridor is an artistic coup which maximises the effect of the passage as a portal to a recessed, forbidden world.

With this mental preparation, one enters the "Back Room" which quickly reveals itself to be a dark room with clear sexual connotations and where icons of design history such as the Wassily Chair by Marcel Breuer or the Day Bed by Eileen Gray discard their bourgeois innocence and reservedness.

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Global Street Food by Mike Meiré	Jean Nouvel at Cologne 2011	Frederik Roijé at Cologne 2011