Can
fashion and art respond to current social, economic, cultural and environmental urgencies and shape new paradigmatic positions?
Transfashional explores the ways in which artists and fashion designers are engaging and contributing to these questions.
Artists & designers:
Manora Auersperg, Anna-Sophie Berger, Martin Bergström, Linnea Bågander,
Christina Dörfler-Raab, Afra Kirchdorfer, Kate Langrish-Smith, Maximilian Mauracher, Janusz Noniewicz, Dominika Wirkowska,
Wojciech Małolepszy, Robert Pludra, Fashion and Product Design departments of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, Minna Palmqvist,
Ana Rajčević, Lara Torres
Curated by: Dobrila Denegri
Transfashional was conceived as exhibition-in-progress
which began with a series of discursive sessions which included renowned designer Hussein Chalayan, curators José Teunissen
(Arnheim Fashion Biennial) and Susanne Neuburger (mumok − Museum Moderner Kunst Wien) as well as emerging creatives whose
practice is situated between fashion and art. Fostering collaborative and experimental work in each of previous exhibitions
in London, Warsaw and Vienna, Transfashional evolved through a series of new productions which aimed to re-define fashion
beyond its conventional notions. This same direction will be further explored through the upcoming exhibition at Kalmar konstmuseum
which, especially for this occasion, will present three daring Swedish fashion designers: Linnea Bågander, Martin Bergström
and Minna Palmqvist.
As this emerging generation of artists and designers reflect on the world around them, they
highlight the need for a profound revision of the processes of production and social relations that derive from them. They
turn away from the fashion industry and its super-accelerated rhythms of production. Their quest for alternatives drives and
inspires new productions − not of goods but of ideas. Indeed, more than wearable and functional, many of these works are critical,
engaged and conceptual, and can be seen as symbols and symptoms of the present zeitgeist.
Through their works Lara
Torres and Anna Sophie Berger explore the critical agency of fashion com-menting on the process of overproduction and overconsumption.
In the attempt to move beyond these mechanisms typical for the mainstream fashion system, designers Afra Kirchdorfer and Minna
Palmqvist, are revisiting the very process of creation of garments, reflecting upon the body beyond fashion’s standards and
beauty imperatives. Body is central also to Linnea Bågander, Ana Rajčević and Kate Langrish-Smith, whose researches tend to
raise questions of wearability and functionality of garments and adornments. Through their works they play with conventional
notions of bodily morphology and experiment with performative and choreographic elements in order to trace new forms that
redesign the boundaries of fashion and how we define it. Among numerous ways to define fashion, one of the most basic ones
is still built on the relation and interplay between the body and the fabrics that enfold it. Materiality of the fabric, its
texture and surface are important parts of the research of Manora Auersperg, Christina Dörfler-Raab and Martin Bergström.
Each of them, in a very singular way works with the qualities of surface, colour and pattern, using innovative or even unorthodox
ways to weave, dye and create pattern-motives. Maximilian Mauracher also works with patterns, developing within this project
NOUS001 - a machine capable of learning and associative reasoning, which evolved from its initial stage when it was randomly
collecting visual data to the final one where its neuronal network became capable of generating pattern and textile sketches.
Especially for the exhibition at Kalmar konstmuseum, he has collaborated with Designarkivet in Nybro, sampling some of the
patterns and pattern-sketches belonging to its collection, reprocessing them in new and unedited forms. A group of young Polish
designers together with their professors Janusz Noniewicz, Dominika Wirkowska, Wojciech Małolepszy and Robert Pludra from
Warsaw Art Academy realised collective work which combines elements of fashion, design, music, film which were generated through
a year-long seminar dedicated to the question of being active or passive, both as a citizen and as a creative person, in relation
to one’s social, political and cultural surrounding.
Transfashional was first presented at the Austrian Cultural
Forum in London, and then in the larger form in the Centre of Contemporary Art Zamek Ujazdowski in Warsaw and at the MQ -
Muse-umsQuartier in Vienna. It was organised by the University of Applied Arts Vienna in collaboration with Austrian Cultural
Forum Warsaw, London College of Fashion and the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw and with the support of the Federal Ministry
for Arts and Culture, Constitution and Media, Austria, Federal Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Austria and Embassy of Austria
in Stockholm.
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http://transfashional.comhttps://www.instagram.com/transfashional/https://www.facebook.com/transfashional/http://www.kalmarkonstmuseum.se/exhibition/transfashional/Kalmar konstmuseum
Stadsparken
SE 392 33 Kalmar
