DE.FASH.STRUCTION @ Design Space on October 7th 2015
DE.FASH.STRUCTION: Telling stories through fashion curated by Khulood Thani
Wednesday 7 October, 2015 7:00 p.m. 1971 – Design Space The Flag Island Sharjah, United Arab Emirates
The designers in De.Fash.Struction explore ways of documenting the United Arab Emirates’ rich cultural heritage and modern references through the medium of contemporary fashion. They employ the techniques of deconstruction in their newly commissioned projects for this exhibition.
The exhibited designs take these cultural and local narratives as source material using the deconstruction technique. Deconstruction in fashion implies an undoing of the structure of a garment, a refusal to ‘finish’ it. It suggests working with subtractions or displacements and are thinking of the function and meaning of the garment itself, which might even appear to becoming apart. A recurring motif of deconstruction fashion is the reversal of the relation between the body and the garment. It challenges the relationship between memory and modernity, the enduring and the ephemeral. Garments call attention to the mechanics of their production which in turn becomes a process of analytic creation.
De.Fash.Struction. branches out into segments that unveil multiple aspects and vantage points that the designers chose to respond to. The work shows heritage practices that have been rooted in the United Arab Emirates years before the country’s formation till today; the designers point to past and present economic practices, ornamental methods, and domestic customs through their work.
The exhibition also highlights the designer’s research on the modernisation of the urban fabric of the United Arab Emirates, as well as their views of contemporary architecture and the metropolis surrounding them. Nature is also present in the exhibition in the form of designed fashion objects that pose the themes of nature in the United Arab Emirates in relation to man.
Designers: Alia Bin Omair, Alia Dawood, Ahmed Alanzi, Amal Haliq, Ayah Al Bitar, Bahar Al Bahar, Bidwa, Cinema Akil, Faissal El-Malak, Fatema Fardan, Khalid Shafar, Katya Kovtunovich, Mirjam Hiller, Nadine Kanso, oe-o, POZE/ARAZZI, Saeed Khalifa, Tahir Sultan, Tina Luther, Tijana Mladenovic, YO_CY KALO
* Tijana Mladenovic Tree of Life, 2015 100% silk (tusar silk and raw silk), dried palm leaves