Materiality Meaning Media II

Fashion & Performance: Materiality, Meaning, Media was an exhibition co-curated by Bugg and Ziesche in 2015. The exhibition proposal was selected by Melbourne Spring Fashion Week for the Cultural Program 2015. The exhibition was shown across three galleries in the Design Hub, RMIT, Melbourne, Australia (Fig 1,2,3,5).

The curators selected 21 international contemporary artists working with experimental fashion and performance on film. The exhibition included, films, garments, dress related props and live performances. It was open to the public for a month and was supported by a public programme of events.

The exhibitions selection process was
to identify from the curator’s perspective practitioners who worked at the intersection of Fashion and Performance, where the body is employed as a site of developing narrative and embodied meaning, communicated through film.

The curatorial premise of the exhibition was to test performative modes of production.

The curators aimed to engage audiences on an experiential and embodied level, through the audience’s own experiences and understanding of wearing clothes.

The exhibition design aimed to encourage a physical and empathetic relationship to the works in the space.

The exhibition included 21 established
and emerging practitioners from around
the globe and included: Anna Baumgart, Maria Blaisse, Ulrik Martin Larsen, Charlotte Gyllenhammar, Imme van der Haak, Bart Hess & Lucy McCrae, B O U D I C C A, HEYNIEK, Pyuupiru, Luke White & Remi Weekes, Marie and Kristian Schuller, Jacob Kok, Hussein Chalayan, Margret Wibmer, Adele Varcoe, D & K (Ricarda Bigolin and Nella Themelios), Lucy and Jorge Orta (Fig 6B). Coming from diverse backgrounds in fashion, textiles, architecture and the visual arts, some of the artists have trained or worked in more than one discipline and all have a preoccupation with clothing the visual, experiential and performing body.