This programme celebrates the secret life of clothes, and the enigmatic qualities that emanate from the filmic treatment of their materiality. Including extraordinary footage by filmmakers and artists such as Georges Méliès, Hans Richter and Erwin Wurm, it is a collection of film techniques which set clothes’ empty shells in motion. Through various modes of displaying they allow clothes to assume new shapes or spin off into abstraction. Clothes and cloth are presented in rituals such as folding and unfolding, touching and feeling, soaking and inflating, transforming, flying or dancing. They are independent, at least to a degree, of the body parts that normally give them meaning. By obscuring their immediate function, films in this programme reveal clothes as estranged, dreamlike, playful and elusive—making them potent carriers of fascination, desire, emotion and sensual pleasure.
With an introduction by programme co-curator Marketa Uhlirova +
artist-filmmaker Anna-Nicole Ziesche in conversation with fashion designer Hamish Morrow
>Read Marketa Uhlirova’s essay The Enigma of the Fashion Object
>Read Caroline evans’ essay Anna-Nicole Ziesche’s States of Mind and Dress
>Read Marion von Hofacker’s essay Richter’s Films and the Role of the Radical Artist
1927-1941
>Read Lynda Nead’s essay Georges Méliès’s Le déshabillage impossible and Ferdinand Zecca’s Monsieur et Madame sont pressées
>Read Renate Stauss’ essay Erwin Wurm’s 59 Positions
>Read Sam Serafy’s essay Warner’s Corset Advertisement
>Read Petra Dominková and Vaclav Kofron’s essay The Extinct Globe and the Found Glove
