After going to the brilliant Transfashional Talk at London College of Fashion back in February, I was really looking forward to going to Warsaw to celebrate the opening of it’s joint exhibition in Warsaw. However, as so often happens, a combination of too many meetings and too little time, meant I wasn’t able to go. Thankfully, our Associate Dean of Postgraduate Communities, Dr Shaun Cole, wrote a few words on the exhibition, which I’m pleased to share with you here.
The second instalment of the collaboratively developed exhibition project Transfashional opened at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art on Friday 19 May.
Curated by art historian and curator Dobrila Denegri ‘Transfashional: Experimental Fashion in the Context of Contemporary Art’ builds on and develops the exhibition that was first staged at Austrian Cultural Forum in London.
The project began when fashion designer Hussein Chalayan, curators José Teunissen (Arnheim Fashion Biennial and Dean at LCF), Susanne Neuburger (MUMOK – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien), Barbara Putz-Plecko and Beatrice Jaschke (Die Angewandte) asked how art and fashion can respond to current social, economic, cultural and environmental urgencies.
The collaborative and experimental work shown in this exhibition transcends boundaries between disciplines, as the artists and designers create conceptual and critical works that highlight the need for change in production processes and social relations.
Of the ten ‘installations’ spread out across the ground floor exhibition spaces at Ujazdowski Castle, the majority are by artists and designers who showed in London. However, with a new space and time to reflect and develop ideas, some of these had been rethought and altered to further thoughts and discussions.
Christina Dörfler-Raab, for example, collaborated with artist and performer Jasmin Schaitl to further consider corrosive experiments with dying processes, while Maximilian Mauracher’s new site specific piece translates graphic signs to textiles.
A new collaboration that brought together students from fashion and product design departments of Warsaw Art Academy with Polish artists/designers Janusz Noniewicz, Dominika Wirkowska, Wojciech Małolepszy and Robert Pludra is a video animation and interactive installation inspired by Austrian author Robert Musil’s novel Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß.
Transfashional is organised by the Austrian Cultural Forum Warsaw in collaboration with Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, University of Applied Arts in Vienna and London College of Fashion and with the support of the Federal Ministry for Arts and Culture, Constitution and Media, Austria. For more information see here.
