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GSK Contemporary – Aware: Art, Fashion & Identity Historical Introduction Yoko Ono (Cut Piece, video 1964) Cut Piece is one of many actions that Yoko Ono created as DIAS [Destruction in Art Symposium]. She performed this in 1964, Japan, and again at Carnegie Hall, New York, in 1965. Ono sat motionless on the stage after inviting the audience to come up and cut away her clothing, covering her breasts at the moment of un-bosoming. Yoko emancipates the women from their clothing and identity at the same time respecting her feminine body. This sensitive work allows us to dwell on the rise of the feminist movement and art activism, which is one a theme that has inspired many of the artists in this exhibition. Joseph Beuys (Felt Suit, 1970) The original Felt Suit was tailored from one of Beuys’s own suits, and can be seen as an oblique self-portrait. For Beuys, the suit was an extension of his felt sculptures, in which the matted fabric appeared as ‘an element of warmth’. He explained: “Not even physical warmth is meant... Actually I mean a completely different kind of warmth, namely spiritual or evolutionary warmth or the beginning of an evolution.” This work allows us to reflect on the spiritual power of textiles and clothing, which has inspired the artists in this exhibition. Cindy Sherman (Doll clothes, 1975) In Doll Clothes we see Sherman disguised as paper doll on her way to the dressing table. But while she watches herself in the mirror a menacing hand appears from off-camera, ripping the dress of the doll’s body. Nude again, she is stuffed back in to a plastic sleeve, the straitjacket of conformism and anonymity. The act of dressing up stands for the potential of masquerade and self-transformation, which Sherman was too act as an art principle for the next thirty years. Doll Clothes shows the story of a failure speaking of a creature that does not succeed to attain self-defined subjectivity. Sherman explains the function and menacing: “the hand is like the parent telling the child that they are misbehaving and have to stay inside the book.” Rosemarie Trockel (Schizo-Pullover, 1988 and Balklava, 1986) Schizo-Pullover : The human need for coupling, as well as the possible existence of multiple personalities, is expressed succinctly in this double-necked sweater. The knitted garment yokes two bodies together in an awkward fashion. The practical point of the sweater is social; but when it is viewed, fully loaded, together with the montage version of a single, doubled wearer, the work ends up insisting that there are fabrics that bind self and other, and are difficult to tell apart. Balklava: we are plural; even within ourselves we are plural, always some aspects hidden, clandestine, both in society, in life, and in our minds and personality. The baklava is a knitted helmet: it once provided protection from the elements, but since the late 1960s it has also been associated with terrorism and is a symbol of clandestinity, violence and fear. Such as in all Trokel’s knitted works, Balklava and Schizo-Pullover patterns were created with the aid of a computer and manufactured on a industrial knitting

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machine. Balaklava thus questions and potentially revises the terms of ‘women’s work’. Opening Yinka Shonibare (New commission tbc) Having described himself as a ‘post-colonial’ hybrid, Shonibare questions the meaning of cultural and national definitions. To achieve this he employs the brightly coloured iconic 'African' fabrics a four-colour Dutch wax-printed cotton and transposes this onto historical 18/19th century dress styles. Shonibare’s says of the choice of materials: “In fact these fabrics are not authentically African the way people think and they prove to have a crossbred cultural background quite of their own. And it’s the fallacy of that signification that I like. It’s the way I view culture — an artificial construct." And, ironically the main exporters of 'African' fabric are based in the UK and in the Netherlands. (Children’s clothes…) Salon room 1 Andrea Zittel (A-Z Six Month Seasonal Uniforms 1992-95) Zittel’s work as an artist is intertwined with her sustainable philosophy of living. Her clothes are both sculptures and functional objects, in particular the ‘apron’, which is traditionally the housewives most useful garment. She has hundreds of styles for different occasions, different fabrics, hand-made and died using natural dyes. She also makes organic cloth using traditional felting techniques to make accessories and home wear, where the making of the material is both a ritual therapy and a sculptural expression, recalling the tradition of home craft. She represents a holistic view of creativity where one’s environment and identity are interwoven and one of the same. Yoji Yamamoto “Ever since I began my career I have always questioned fashion, I could also put it that way: I hate fashion.”… “Fashion sighs after trends. I want timeless elegance. Fashion has no time. I do. I say: Hello Lady, how can I help you? Fashion has no time to even ask such a question, because it is constantly concerned with finding out: What will come next? It is more about helping women to suffer less, to attain more freedom and independence.”… “Sit down, calm down, you are turning in a carousel that moves too fast. Fashion has lost respect of clothing. My job is to regain the respect for clothing. Merchandising and advertising have become too powerful, too dominant during the last few years. I say: Wait a moment, slow down!”… “The acceleration of things prevents thinking about it. Doubts are excluded. All follow. Until everything looks like everything else. A sort of equalization.”…. Salon room 2 Gabriele Di Matteo (La Nuda Umanità - History Stripped Bare 1999-2010)

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This installation comprises of 200 oil on canvas paintings each measuring 30x40cm, which present selected moments in the history of the Western World: from the prehistoric days of ‘Neanderthal Man’, the 'Assassination of Julius Caesar', 'Christopher Columbus Discovers America', or 'The Marriage of Prince Charles and Lady Diana’. These uniformly sized paintings are hung salon-style and arranged chronologically. The characters are naked, apart from a single ornament or accessory. Evoked through their nakedness, they appear physically vulnerable, yet they confront the grandeur of historic events. The work questions notions of heroism and progress and explores the power clothing and uniforms have in defining images, in creating icons, which will be transmitted throughout history. (In addition to the paintings, a documentary-style video of the commercial painter - commissioned by Di Matteo to create the paintings – can also part of the exhibition). Video mezzanine Kim Sooja (Mumbai Laundry Field) Sooja views the dress as a symbolic material, identifiable "with the body - the container of the spirit." Through her practice of sewing, the artist combines Eastern and Western traditions and transposes elements of Korean culture into metaphors of the universal human condition. The ideas of transience and travel, considered in a literally and existential way, are always present in her works, which range from videos to objects made by cutting and sewing together scraps of old fabrics and pieces of clothing which belong to ancestors. She pays particular the attention to fabrics and to clothes and so to their specific cultural connotations. In Mumbai Laundry Field we are exposed to the global phenomena of fashion where we witness the 10,000 dhobis-wallah at Bombay’s Mahalaxmi Dhobi Ghat washhouse, scrubbing several tons of clothes destined for export to fuel our high streets. The open-air laundrette is a ballet of low cast activity, slapping and twisting the fabrics against the granite in thousands of multicoloured pools. Large Gallery * Intercultural Relationships Society, identity, culture are not something static and immutable, nor determined once and for all, but something alive and ever changing Handan Börüteçene (Waters that Tie/Waters that Untie, 2007) Composed of a long green silk dress encrusted with Byzantine majolica and surrounded by lecterns on which are posed photographs presenting the dress in Istanbul and Venice, it collects the documentation of a symbolic and ‘diplomatic’ journey amongst the signs of the tormented historical relationship between those two cities. Identity and memory are usually at the centre of Börüteçene’s artistic research such as the common cultural elements of the Mediterranean;

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but she also points at the frenetic contemporary mobility and the practice of photo-souvenir, in which the image has the power to crystallize a presence in a specific time and place. Mella Jaarsma (Shelter Me, The Warriors, or Refugee Only 2003) The sculptural works of Mella Jaarsma are drawn from a sensible attention to life-style and expressive-symbolic aspects of society. She deals with clothes that evoke questions around gender and religious identity, as well as shelters that implicitly re-call the phenomenon of migration and hybridization: mantles-curtains-burka that cover the body favouring its form, while at the same time they protect and constrain, they declare and hide. They are made of organic materials, found out by the artist in the place in which she is working: skins, horns, algae, and scraps of fabric and fragments of military uniforms. Marcello Maloberti (Marcello who arrives by train 2001) The photographs show the portraits of shaven men in an Algerian barber near the main train station in Milan. Here we find specific masculine/macho beauty codes but also the need to find a meeting place, which is a very mediterranean way to socialize. The barber’s shop depicts real daily life in global urban context - a place of gossip, where we find layers of society unified under the simple red apron and standard short-back-and-sides. At the same time, the clients are dressed in a standard red apron with the signature of the barbers and portrayed in aristocratic poses. This particular posing evokes the ancient aristocratic portraiture as handed on by history of art; the cloth could be the cloak of a knight or a cardinal dress. In both cases the uniform turns into something magic that indicates social prestige.

Maria Papadimitriou (Romacoat) Clothing is symbolic and linked to tradition and beliefs. Interested in cultural specificities and in the overcoming of imposed stereotypes, Papadimitriou creates projects characterized by public, social and collective dimension. In her ongoing workshops with the Greek Roma communities, she has created a number of collective projects together with the women; amongst these are the ‘Romadress’ and ‘Romacoat’. The coat stands out as a symbol of the Roma cultural identity, made from the typical eastern-European blankets, evoking the traditional Romany decorative style. Evolving from the nomadic times, Blankets were fundamental to their lifestyle and living quarters of their homes –even today they become floor, wall, bed coverings or hangings the Romacoat symbolises bonds between soft architecture, mobility and shelter.

* Geopolitics The world situation remains contradictory Meschac Gaba (Perruques Architectures 2006) Gaba is interested in the process of cultural transformation, aiming to dismantle every pre-concept of historical and cultural identity, he works against ethnocentrism and in favour of a deconstruction of icons and stereotypes. In Perruques Architectures, Gaba uses braids, traditionally used by African women for their hairstyle, to realize wigs-sculptures that recall the forms of architectural

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masterpieces of western culture as such as the World Financial Centre, the Chrysler Building or the Empire State Building. Alicia Framis (China Five Stars, 100 Ways to Wear a Flag, 2007) Based both in Shanghai and Barcelona Framis combines these different cultures in projects exploring the social components of the contemporary city. For China Five Star she asked several fashion designers to make dresses inspired by the Chinese flag. Framis empowers women by presenting them in a national symbol. At the same time this work is seen as a perceptive and critical look at globalisation: how many women today wear clothes ‘Made in China’? This work refers to her earlier anti-dog series, a collection of designs made with the Tyvec fabric - fire proof, bullet proof and dog proof. The anti-dog collection protects women from aggressive behaviour and gives them the courage and strength to walk around fearless and powerful. Marina Abramovic (The Family III, 2008) The Family III, Laos is part of the series of photographs The Quiet in the Land. Abramovic depicts an army of beautiful children playing war games, toting guns and dressed in camouflage gear. The reality behind this fictional work is that war is not a game for over 300,000 children worldwide who are direct participants in armed conflicts. Sharif Waked (Chic Point 2003) In the video “Chic Point”, a series of models show, emerging from a dark background. Zippers, weaved nets, hoods, and buttons serve the unifying theme of exposed flesh. After few minutes, the images of the parade are substituted by a series of Palestinian men who lift shirts, robes, and jackets at Israeli checkpoints. In Chic Point the contradictory interpretations of nudity as a fashion request or as a cause of humiliation puts two worlds – one of high fashion and one of imposed closure – in a powerful reflection on aesthetics, the body, surveillance, and freedom. Andreas Gursky (Kuwait Stock Exchange 2007) Gursky is something like a cold, impassionate documenter of globalisation and of its flows of data and people, architecture and mass spectacle, of it’s consensus-based collectiveness. Kuwait Stock Exchange is a digitally manipulated image of men dressed in traditional white Thab and Ghutrah and seen from a distance the human images do not stand out as individuals. The scene is an expression of macro-phenomena linked to global financial and economical power and the uniformity of the clothing is an expression of rigidly codified social roles. Arthur Zmijevski (KR WP, 2000) A group of Czech soldiers dressed in their uniforms go marching down the street in unison. The second time we see them they are marching naked in a closed room. The effect is merely comical. The controlled system no longer has any control over them and they seem to have regained their nationalized bodies. But do their bodies really belong to themselves, is the authority of the army dependant on the power of the uniform? We question this strong and debunking work.

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Hussein Chalayan (tbc) Chador spring collection 1998: a provocative exploration of Islamic women's place in society using the chador as the fulcrum. Chalayan is sensitive to the problems in the Middle East, presented three models wearing one chador, which could be shortened to become a mask, and another one in a stretch fabric that squeezed the legs and arms, blocking them…. Grayson Perry (The Walthamstow Tapestry, 2009) The Walthamstow Tapestry explores the emotional resonance of brand names in our lives and our quasi-religious relationship to consumerism. Charting man's passage from birth to death, the tapestry is peppered with leading brands encountered along the way. Stripped of their logos and thus much of their identity, the names run alongside - often incongruous - depictions of people going about their everyday lives: walking the dog, nursing children, skateboarding, hoovering, and, of course, shopping. Perry is a great chronicler of contemporary life, in whose work sentiment and nostalgia sit subversively alongside fear and anger. In The Walthamstow Tapestry many of the world's leading names, from luxury brands such as Louis Vuitton and Tiffany to high street giants such as Marks and Spencer and IKEA, come under Perry's gaze in this cautionary and prophetic tale of modern day life. Inspired by antique batik fabrics from Malaysia as well as eastern European folk art this vast work provides a colourful, rich and complex visual journey across our contemporary landscape. * Intercultural Relationships Society, identity, culture are not something static and immutable, nor determined once and for all, but something alive and ever changing Katerina Sedá (For Every Dog a Different Master, 2007) This project is based on the history of the biggest complex of prefabricated houses realized in the Czech Republic, where in the 1970, the grey and monochrome buildings became colourful. Inspired by this episode, Sedá fixed on an image the different colour of each house, and she used it as a texture for a material from which 1.000 shirts were been sewn and packed. Each family received a shirt, on which as sender’s name was written the name of another family. Thanks to this referential mechanism, the artist becomes anonymous catalyst of new encounters, leaving the role of protagonist and producer to the recipient of the artwork and to the birth of new possible relation-ship. Clothing becomes a way to communicate in the most direct way the renewed sense of belonging to the place and to the community. Azra Aksamija (Nomadic Mosque 2005) The Nomadic Mosque is video of a wearable architecture, a minimal-volume mosque whose design is based on the worshippers personal needs. It allows for individual religious practice and aims at redefining traditional forms and functions of mosques in the contemporary context. Frontier Vest is a wearable prototype for the expression of different belief systems. It is a hybrid combination of a contemporary jacket and ritual objects. It can be transformed

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either into a Talit, a Jewish prayer shawl, or into an Islamic prayer rug. It lends itself to different uses, both sacred and secular. * Convention, Ritual and Authority The routine of our daily life is dependant on small rituals Gillian Wearing (Sixty Minute Silence 1996) Wearing has made several bodies of work that focus on groups of people. One, Sixty Minute Silence is a recording of people dressed in police uniforms sitting as if for a group photograph for an hour. An hour-long video of 26 police officers arranged in three ranks for a formal shot. As time goes by, the uniformed ranks waver slightly. The officers glance at each other. Their initial stillness eventually gives way to fidgeting. Some stifle giggles. Minute by minute, the control the uniforms signify erodes. The film individuates and humanizes a uniformed mass. Nasan Tur (Human Behaviours) The randomly placed slide-projectors show thousands of slides in four-second intervals - hundreds of pictures showing passers-by taken in different European cities, rigorously organized into categories. We live constantly under the watchful eye of the CCTV camera, individuals with codes whose every move is monitored. We are used to being labelled, pigeonholed forever on the strength of superficial stereotypes. The result - we end up keeping tabs on each other, defining, equating and distinguishing, giving to phenomena of social inclusion and exclusion based on parameters fixed at random. It is the tendency to an ironic extreme, organizing the collection on the basis of attitudes that are in no way exceptional, that are indeed hackneyed and commonplace. But paradoxically it is precisely the absolute ordinariness of the portraits, which have been catalogued to allow the variegated diversity of our everyday universe to emerge. Jenny Rogers (Trick Saddle, 2004-2005) This water ballet imitates and simulates typical bodily gestures and scenes from Western films: gunfights, wrestling, falling, and saddleback riding. Iconic musical clips infuse the atmosphere with a sense of "action”, undermining the cowboy myth, as defined and perpetuated by the Western film culture, and offer a female alternative to the classic hero. A humorous, feminist assault on the Spaghetti Western, criticizing and striving to eliminate the genre's rules. Underwater photography means to subvert "omnipotent" masculinity. Movement is no longer fast, easy or instinctive, but rather slow and neutralized. Pinar Yolacan (Perishables; Maria, 2003-2007) Pinar's photographic series are exquisite portraits of elderly women dressed in sculptural articles made from meat or poultry offal that Yolacan designed specifically for each of her models. These portraits challenge the portrait tradition in Western art history. There is lots of draping, and most of the clothes are inspired from the Baroque era and Portuguese colonial style architecture reminiscent of biblical statues. They remind us of universal themes like being temporary, aging and death.

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Gallery Interludes (Performance / mise-en-scene to discuss) Boltanski (pile of clothes & crane shown in Paris Grand Palais – possible installation for courtyard) Pistoletto (Possible installation for courtyard or public programming) Comme des Garcons / Merce Cunningham 1994 Vanessa Beecroft (Archive work – red wigs) The connivance between art and fashion; about female figure and identity, fashion, social illnesses (anorexia); provoking questions around identity society and voyeurism in the complex relationship between viewer, model and context. Orta (Any number of works) Lucy Orta (Casey’s Pawns, 2004) Fallujah-Casey’s Pawns will be a video work based on an installation and live work choreographed by Lucy Orta at the Victoria and Albert Museum, just five days before the transfer of sovereignty in Iraq on the 25th June 2004. The performance composed of 50 volunteers, wearing customized combat suits was a silent meditation for peace lasting 2 hours and staged in three different galleries against the back drop of the museum’s tombs, trophies and sepulchres of history’s battles. Shilpa Gupta (Shadow 3) Interactive video projection incorporating the viewers simulated shadow, 2007, 315 in | 800 cm wide As the visitor walks in front of the projection, they see their shadow becomes an active content of the video. Using vision technology, each person’s silhouette merges with the narrative – various consumer objects begin falling from the sky, the viewer can collect them and pull them onto themselves, accumulating a huge mantel of junk. Gallery 3 * Sustainable (Envisaging) Futures At one with our world Issey Miyake (A-POC 1999) Miyake’s research on the industrial transformation of the design process, leaving behind traditional Japanese forms and crafts to innovate in the manufacturing process, is most evident in his ‘A Piece of Cloth’ work. Miyake exemplifies the design researcher where we leave behind ‘fashion’ to marvel on conceptual ideas, which as it so happens can be worn. A-POC is both imposing and sculptural as an installation and as discrete and neutral as an individual piece of cloth, but a closer inspection the cloth is dotted by tiny marks where the loops of the circular jersey fabric are welded into double jacquard creating dashes, which enable each

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women to snip and cut a garment to their own shape – from mass-manufacture to bespoke. Helen Storey (Disappearing Dress 2007) Helen Storey (MBE) creates exquisite dresses constructed from a hand-made enzyme based textile that dissolves in water over time. The scaffolds contraption and gradually lowers the lacy fabric into giant bowls of water. Each dress behaves differently as it enters the liquid and the dissolving material creates vibrant underwater fireworks that are magnified by the bowls. Reflecting on the un-sustainability of fashion and the waste that is generated when we discard our clothes through fashion’s contradictory need for renewal. Helen’s research stems from an interest in developing biodegradable materials to ‘auto-destruct’ and leave no polluting imprint on the environment. This work is the result of a long-standing collaboration with Leeds University, department of physics. Claudia Losi (Whale suits 2010) Recycling and reusing means a sustainable attitude, but also an addition of value: clothing can be a deposit of previous life, memories and layers of meaning. Claudia Losi stages the metamorphosis of traditional cashmere cloth, from it’s normal function as suit drapery, to that of a skin of a huge 1:1 scale whale. This cloth whale is a sculptural site of performance that catalyses stories, narrations and experiences, which over time develops back into the fashionable men’s suits it was always destined to be. The suits carry the memory, adventures and relationships that were collected and woven together during the journey as a whale. Martin Margiela (fungus trials in 3-parts 1996-1997 – Boijmans Museum Van Beunigen / Brooklyn Bridge New York / Kyoto Museum of Modern Art) In collaboration with a microbiologist, Margiela treated a series of historical collections with a concoction of bacterial fungus designed specifically for the compost process of the different fabric compositions. The collections were displayed on stockman mannequins in a rigid row in the three locations, as an experiment to document the natural destruction of the material, which over time reacted in strange – even beautiful - ways as the mushrooms and fungus feed of the fabrics, creating new textures and colours. By destroying his clothes, created over years of work as a commercial designer, his research evokes the endless cycle of creation and decay and rebirth, parallels can be drawn to the consumer cycle of buying and discarding and make reference to the contradiction of fashion and sustainability. Hussein Chalayan Buried Earth collection (tbc) Dae Rees (Carapace 2006-2007) Carapace is an installation of abstract, figurative, structural casings created from inlayed leather-hide. The forms are derived from dress patterns, distorted onto mannequin figures constructed by the artist. Researching marquetry, illumination and the Intaglio process of acid etching from the sixteenth century, Rees has inlayed materials to transform the surface of the leather hide. His work

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identifies links between historical and contemporary techniques, from a dying specialised craft such as inlay, to create new aesthetic qualities of the intricate craft. Marie-Ange Guillminot (White Clothes from Hiroshima / Vetements Blancs d’Hiroshima 2005-2007) On residency in the Hiroshima Memorial Museum, Marie-Ange was moved by the photographs of victims’ clothing she found in a book by photographer Hiromi Tsuchida. Further research led her to study the pieces themselves, take patterns and re-create each of the garments in white cloth. Replicating the fabric of the period, each garment has been painstakingly reproduced with its flaws and hand stitching of the seamstress who made them for a child or worker. We are taken on a cathartic journey, imaging the people behind the clothes and their lives before the tragedy. Later, she transposes the pattern shapes of the garments onto traditional Kimonos working in collaboration with the most famous makers in Kyoto, the Hiroshima garments take on a delicate shadow against the backdrop of history. Tradition, memory, healing and the very personal - all occupy the work of Marie-Ange. Marie-Ange Guillminot (Cauris- Salon de Transformation 1997) The Cauris is a shell, an organic form, which rolls in on its self. It is also the shape of a pair of stockings once manipulated according to a set of simple instructions supplied by the artist on a black and white garment label. The Salon is a space where we, the viewer can through 5 simple gestures transform a very basic feminine, somewhat fetish object into a useful accessory – a small elastic back-pack. The artist allows us to take the bag away, after all we are the creator, but she hopes that we will ‘pay’ her for the idea she has seeded, the idea of self-realisation and auto-transformation. Elise Magne (Fibredust accessories: Mittens and Mask, 2009) Fibredust is a felt, which Magne manufactures according the principles of woollen felting accept the fibres she rubs together of dust collected in places full of social connotations such as hospitals, shelters, prisons… The objects she makes are accessories such as masks, gloves, booties, hoods - evoking survival or warmth, yet made from the layers of suffering, the invisible matter that surrounds and connects us to places and situations. Vito Acconci (Umbruffla 2010) This is a new concept for an umbrella to cocoon in. Fix to your waist and wrist, so that both hands are free. Wearing it, you could dodge a passer-by, turn it windward and even welcome a companion under it with you. Umbruffla is made from two way mirrored Mylar. From outside the surface is mirrored, so while you can see through from inside, you would be camouflaged by the reflections of the city which shimmers on you as you walk. The name of the object comes from English - 'ruffle'. When the object is closed, "the ruffles are gathered into a ruffle", while open "the ruffles unfold, fan out, spring out, into an umbruffla." (The Umbruffla is being produced for our exhibition)

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Nasan Tur (Speaker-Backpack, Cooking-Backpack, Demonstration-Backpack, Sabotage-Backpack, Fan-Backpack, 2006) Each of the backpack has a certain/special function. They consist of an omnium gatherum of objects that allow functionability of each backpack. The visitors have the possibility to ‘borrow’ the backpacks und use them in public. Where and for what they demonstrate or sabotage, for whom they cook or for whom they are fan, is their own decision. The work "backpacks" only puts the materials at their disposal and allows for the necessary mobility of the makeshift constructions.