AWARE SYMPOSIUM London College Fashion Monday 6 - Tuesday 7 December 2010

To coincide with the exhibition Aware: Art Fashion Identity at the Royal Academy of the Arts London, the London College of Fashion symposium will expand on three of the major themes through a series of round-table discussions around the work of a number of contemporary artists who utilize the medium of clothing in their work.

By creating a dynamic dialogue between leading figures in the field of contemporary art, fashion history and theory and retail we intend to explore clothing through memory and tradition; changing cultural identities; and social or political confrontation.

Vito Acconci, Umbruffla 2010

SCHEDULE OF EVENTS & SPEAKERS

The symposium will open with a commissioned performance Balena Project by Italian artist Claudia Losi and is followed by a one-day event at London College of Fashion.

Monday 6th December 2010 From 18:00 – 20:00 Venue: Saint Mary’s Church, London, W1H 1PQ

A Performance by Claudia Losi in collaboration with Antonio Marras Followed by roundtable chaired by Christopher Breward With: Jonathan Watkins, Mark Henderson, Anna Zegna Carol Alayne, Sir Tom Baker The performance Balena Project has developed out of the stories of whales beached on the shores of Piacenza during the 19th Century. Losi spent her summers searching to recover their fossils and her personal discovery uncovers deeper historical and geological dimensions, creating a new layer of stories and history of the whales. The Balena Project combines narrative, form and memory, at the heart of which remains the whale’s physical shape. Along its journey, the cloth metamorphoses from traditional cashmere suit drapery, into the patchwork skin of a huge 1:1 scale whale. Here, in the context of AWARE, the whale will evolve back into men’s suits that carry the stories embroidered onto the surface of the cloth. The moving performance in St Mary’s Church combines the narrative experience as actors, wearing the transformed cloth recount the adventures, relationships and memory of the whale.

Claudia Losi Born in 1971 in Piacenza, Italy. Balena Project is also featured in the exhibition AWARE: Art Fashion Identity.

Antonio Marras Italian Fashion designer, from Sardinia. Antonio presented his first eponymous fashion collection in Milan in 1999. For the past six years he has served as Creative Director of Kenzo, where he has been widely applauded for his revitalization and reinterpretation of the label after Takado Kenzo’s retirement in 1999. Antonio Marras has worked closely with Claudio Losi on her Balena Project over a number of years.

Christopher Breward Head of the Research Department at the V&A Museum. He has held lecturing posts in the History of Art and Design at Manchester Metropolitan University and the Royal College of Art. Before working at the V&A he was Head of Research at London College of Fashion, University of the Arts, London, where he still holds a Visiting Professorship. Christopher sits on the Editorial Boards of the journals 'Fashion Theory' and the 'Journal of Design History'. He is an active member on numerous key committees, including the AHRC Peer Review Panel for Visual Arts and Media; the Pasold Research Fund; the Advisory Board of the Raphael Samuel Centre for Metropolitan Studies. Christopher's personal research interests lie in the field of fashion history and he has published widely on fashion's relation to masculinity, metropolitan cultures and concepts of modernity.

Jonathan Watkins Sstudied Philosophy and History of Art at the University of Sydney and is currently the director the Ikon Gallery Birmingham since 1999. Previously he was curator of the Chisenhale Gallery in London Watkins, the Serpentine Gallery (1995-97) and has worked in a freelance capacity for the Biennale of Sydney (1998) at the Castello di Rivoli in Turin, the Venice Biennale and the Hayward Gallery and Tate London. In August-September 2008, the Ikon Gallery invited Claudia Losi to stage workshops around Balena Project with pupils at Erdington Hall Primary School to produce drawings of whales, which were then used by local residents, in a temporary tailor’s shop on Erdington High Street, as patterns to produce hundreds of small fabric whales that formed part of her exhibition.

Mark Henderson Chief Excecutive of Gieves & Hawkes and Chairman of Savile Row Bespoke and is a key purveyor and attendant of London’s bespoke tailoring tradition. Henderson has been at Gieves & Hawkes for 13 years, previously working at Mary Quant and Alfred Dunhill. He was instrumental in the establishment of Savile Row Bespoke in 2004, an organization dedicated to the protection and promotion of the Savile Row tailoring community, which has been the center of British tailoring since 1785.

Anna Zegna Image Director/Head of Communications for Zegna Group. Erminegeldo Zegna was established in 1910 by Anna’s grandfather. While the company is still run by the family and upholds its founding values of quality materials and top level craftsmanship, over the past one hundred years it has become well known as one of the leaders in Italian men’s fashion, with hundreds of shops around the world and annual sales of 700 million euro.

Carol Alayne With over 20 years amongst the Savile Row fraternity, and with a background in banking, Carol is acknowledged as one of the finest women’s tailors in Mayfair today. www.tailoringforwomen.com

Sir Tom Baker Trained at Hardy Amies on Savile Row, Sir Tom set up his own business on Soho’s D’arblay Street in 1996. While 50% of his business comes from tailoring classic bespoke suits in a formal style, the other half comes from show-biz style commissions where Sir Tom Baker is able to flaunt his signature flare. Loyal clients include Robert Plant, Rhys Ifans, Keith Flint (Prodigy), Ant & Dec, Noel Fielding, Take That, Mick Jagger, Terry De Havilland, Stephen Jones, etc.

19:30-20:00 Drinks Reception

Tuesday 7th December From 10-6pm Venue: Rootstein Hopkins Space, LCF, 20 John Princes Street, W1

Opening address: Frances Corner OBE, Head of London College of Fashion

Short introduction: Professor Lucy Orta and Kathleen Soriano Director of Exhibitions at the Royal Academy of the Arts London

11:00-13:00 Morning Session chaired by Dr. Anthony Downey With: Vito Acconci, Nasan Tur, Ex de Medici

The morning session will address the actively politicized nature of dress in contemporary society through the work of artists who employ a number of different strategies to expand upon the self-signifying, culturally unifying, socially segregating, or politically mobilizing potential of dress. Dr. Anthony Downey Programme Director of the M.A. course in Contemporary Art at Sotheby’s Institute of Art, London. He is a longstanding member of the editorial board for Third Text, and his work has been published in a number of international journals. His research activities and teaching focuses on African and Middle Eastern artists, investigating collaborative and participative art practices, human rights, bio-politics and migration, and the potential for an ethics of contemporary art practices. He is currently researching a book on the “asesthetics of the real” which examines artists who engage with issues such as community, ethnography, human rights, re-enactment, migrations, and terrorism.

Vito Acconci Born in New York 1940, Vito Acconci rose to prominence in the 1970s as a conceptual artist, with notable works including Seedbed (1971), Theme Song (1973) and The Red Tapes (1976), which transgressed assumed boundaries between public and private space, and between audience and performer. Positioning his own body as the simultaneous subject and object of the work. Acconci now works across a variety of disciplines, including film and video, sound, sculpture, performance, photography and architecture. He founded the Acconci Studio, a group of architects based in Brooklyn, New York, who design projects for public spaces.

Nasan Tur Nasan Tur is a German-born artist who currently lives and works in Berlin. He is a prolific young artist who works extensively with ideas of displacement and identity. His artworks include Human Behaviours, randomly placed slide-projectors show thousands of slides in four-second intervals - hundreds of pictures showing passers-by taken in different European cities, rigorously organized into categories; and Backpacks: Speaker, Cooking, Demonstration Sabotage, Fan etc. that consist of an omnium gatherum of objects that suggest a function for each backpack. During exhibitions the backpacks constructions are placed at the disposal of the audience to utilize.

Ex de Medici, online conversation with Simon Wright (Griffith Arts, Australia) eX de Medici was born in 1959 in the Riverina district of New South Wales. Her practice incorporates performance and installation art, tattooing, photography, painting and drawing. Her latest work The World, on exhibition at the Fashion Space Gallery is an open-ended curatorial project in which ex has taken and edited still photographs from televised news broadcasts which are passed on to curators across to the globe to select from and arrange as a particular perspective on the world.

13:00-14:00 Lunch

14:00-16:00 Afternoon Session chaired by Gabi Scardi With: Kaat Debo, Marie-Ange Guilleminot, Alicia Framis

The afternoon session will explore dress as a sight of personal and collective memory. Dress becomes the sight upon which lived experience is recorded and can be read. It bears witness both to our celebrations and traumas, and to the passage of time. It becomes a means of engaging with past experience, both our own and that of others, enriching our understanding of larger historical moments and events with its variable and mutable multitude of surfaces and interiors. It provides an opportunity for learning, exchange, and healing.

Gabi Scardi Co-curator of the Royal Academy of the Arts exhibition, Gabi is an independent curator and Art Critic with a strong interest in multidisciplinary practices. Scardi is a Curatorial Counsellor for MAXXI, Museum of the 21st Century Arts, in Rome and co-curates CECAC, The European Course for Contemporary Art Curators, in Milan. Between 2005 and 2009 she was Contemporary Art Advisor to the Province of Milan. In addition to her curatorial practice, Gabi Scardi teaches modules on contemporary art and public art in various Italian Institutions and is a regular contributor to national and international magazines and newspapers.

Kaat Debo Is the current director of the MoMu Fashion Museum in Antwerp. She began her career at the Momu in 2001 as a scientific researcher in 2001, swiftly moving into a curatorial position. She is distinguished for her research work, her close collaboration with contemporary Belgian designers, and her promotion of the ‘intellectual fashion scene.’ Along with her directorship at the museum, she has also filled the position of editor-in-chief at A Magazine, a biannual magazine, which commissions a different designer to curate each issue. Of note is her recent collaboration with curator Bob Verhelst on the Maison Martin Margiela 20 exhibition, which recently exhibited at Somerset House.

Marie-Ange Guilleminot Born in France in 1960, Guilleminot graduated from Villa Arson, Nice in 1981, and now works in a variety of media including film, sculpture and performance in an approach that is both aesthetic and scientific. For AWARE: Art Fashion Identity, Guilleminot exhibits White Clothes from Hiroshima which resulted from a residency in the Hiroshima Memorial Museum and the photographs of victims¹ clothing she discovered in a book by photographer Hiromi Tsuchida. Further research led her to study the pieces themselves, take patterns and re-create each of the garments in white cloth. Replicating the fabric of the period, each garment has been painstakingly reproduced with its flaws and hand stitching of the seamstress who made them for a child or worker.

Alicia Framis Born in Barcelona in 1967, Alicia Framis studied Fine Arts at the Barcelona University and at École des beaux-Arts in Paris. In 2002 she created ‘Anti -Dog’ clothing, a collection comprising of 23 bullet-resistant and stab-proof dresses which addressed the victimization of women. Framis combines different cultures in projects exploring the social components of the contemporary city. Her work is about living between different cultural heritages and the shift from one to the other, but also about the deep feelings of fear linked to tensions between intercultural dynamics, and the difficult relationships between communities.

16:00 Closing remarks from Magdalene Keaney Curatorial Director, Fashion Space Gallery, London College of Fashion Following the symposium, we also hope you can join us for a drink as we celebrate the launch of the Ex De Medici & Vexed Generation exhibition in the Fashion Space Gallery.