In a basement room of the museum there are around 25 objects - lamps, chairs, table, vase - all regular and irregular at the same time. The designers live and work in Israel: Eilon Armon, Gad Charny, Chanan de Lange, Ami Drach and Dov Ganchrow, Tal Gur, Safi Hefetz, Yaacov Kaufman, Pini Leibovich, Raviv Lifshitz, Alon Meron, Willy Mizrachi, Ayala Serfaty, Nati Shamia-Opher, Sharon Shechter, Yuval Tal, Asaaf Warshavsky and Zivia. Some were educated in Israel, predominantly at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem, and others elsewhere, such as London. The exhibition is curated by guest, Ezri Tarazi, Head of the Industrial Design Graduate Program at Bezalel Academy and Ellen Lupton, Curator of Contemporary Design at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum.

The design museum celebrates the ordinary, which, with a little creative action, becomes the extraordinary. Reality shifts and spins - and, with appropriate and exciting design, dull things are exciting. The designers show, in their metamorphosis of the dull, that reality in every sphere and form has such possibility as to make the present reality seem so old, so passé, so broken - so aching for change.

If an object such as a telephone can become a masterpiece with the touch of human hands, then so can communication between people and governments, with that same tender touch. Where is that higher form of government? Where is that masterpiece of cease-fire? Cannot the harmony of contemporary design repeat its model in the wider world?

The exhibition shows the work of 19 Israeli designers, whose objects possess an intriguing physical presence of curiosity and introspection - one chair in particular seems to brood in the corner. These are big experiments in understated size, huge concepts woven tightly into pleasant aesthetic. The plastics mirror in their sheen the people who peer, and show them to be disfigured and distorted. They encourage inquisitiveness but give no easy answers:

'What are you?' - 'I am a chair.'
'But what kind of chair? I mean, who sits there, who reclines there invisible?'
'Oh, someone beyond the physical.'
'I don't understand.'
[With a slouch] 'I am but a chair.'

There are invisible people who belong to these objects. Rather than a mime pretending to pour a teapot, there is a teapot, but no one to pour it. There are harmonious ideas but no one to use them. And suddenly there seems a reason for this oddly tense atmosphere of innovation and extraordinary curios: what it the point of an object so functional and pretty, if there is no one to use it? What is the point of these perfections lying on museum shelves for people to gaze at and speculate upon, if they are not used? What is the point of beautiful things if they never exist for beautiful functions?

These Israeli designers prove that in Israel, as with the rest of the world, there are beautiful, workable, ideal forms already existent in reality. They work and look good at the same time. But they're so small. Just as the best Israeli designs are in a Manhattan museum, so the best social iconoclasm is relegated to a bookstore, another excellent book mapping world peace, that people like to read, but will not use. There are extraordinary things happening in Israel. They are chairs and lamps. So why is all the light in a New York basement?

Christiana SC Spens