Lara Torres
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Transfashional 2016 - 2020

Transfashional 2016 to 2020

Transfashional Rimini from 27.10.19 to 06.01.20 at the City Museum of Rimini, Modern Hall

Exhibition view showing ‘An impossible wardrobe for the invisible’(2011) and ‘Unmaking’(2016) at the City Museum Luigi Tonini in Rimini, Italy 26.10.2019 / 06.01.2020

Exhibition view showing ‘An impossible wardrobe for the invisible’(2011) and ‘Unmaking’(2016) at the City Museum Luigi Tonini in Rimini, Italy 26.10.2019 / 06.01.2020

Transfashional began as a series of collaborative sessions in 2016 with fashion designer Hussein Chalayan, curators José Teunissen (Arnheim Fashion Biennial), Susanne Neuburger (MUMOK - Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien), Barbara Putz-Plecko and Beatrice Jaschke (Die Angewandte) as well as emerging artists and designers whose practice is situated in between fashion and art. This project encouraged collaborative and experimental work which resulted in new productions and transcended boundaries between disciplines.

Transfashional Kalmar ‘Experimentellt mode i relation till samtidskonst’ 26.05.18 - 30.09.18

Transfashional at Kalmar Konstmuseum, Sweden

Transfashional at Kalmar Konstmuseum, Sweden

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Artists: Manora Auersperg, Linnea Bågander, Anna-Sophie Berger, Martin Bergström, Christina Dörfler-Raab, Afra Kirchdorfer, Kate Langrish-Smith, Maximilian Mauracher, Janusz Noniewicz & Dominika Wirkowska & Fashion and Product Design departments of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, Minna Palmqvist, Ana Rajčević, Lara Torres | Curated by: Dobrila Denegri. Photos: Michelangelo Miskulin

Transfashional Vienna at Museums Quartier Wien 07.12.17 - 23.12.17

Artists and designers Manora Auersperg & Konrad Strutz, Anna-Sophie Berger, Christina Dörfler-Raab & Jasmin Schaitl, Lisa Edi, Afra Kirchdorfer, Kate Langrish-Smith, Maximilian Mauracher, Ana Rajčević, Anna Schwarz, Lara Torres, Janusz Noniewicz, Dominika Wirkowska, Wojciech Małolepszy, Robert Pludra, Fashion and Product Design departments of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw | Curated by Dobrila Denegri

Transfashional: Experimental fashion in the context of contemporary art exhibition

19.05. – 04.06.17
Warsaw, Centre of Contemporary Art Zamek Ujazdowski

Can art and fashion respond to current social, economic, cultural and environmental urgencies and shape new paradigmatic positions? The exhibition Transfashional Lab and the accompanying talk at the London College of Fashion, explores the ways in which artists and designers are engaging and contributing to these questions. The exhibition brings together emerging artists from the UK, Poland and Austria. As this emerging generation of artists and designers reflect on the world around them, they highlight the need for a profound revision of the processes of production and social relations which derive from them. They turn away from the fashion industry and it’s super-accelerated rhythms of production. Their quest for alternatives drives and inspires new productions - not of goods but of ideas. Indeed, more than wearable and functional, many of these works are critical, engaged and conceptual, and can be seen as symbols and symptoms of the present zeitgeist.

Unmaking, 2016

An Impossible Wardrobe for the Invisible, 2011

The film Unmaking seeks to deconstruct preconceptions about the relationship between body, clothing, production and consumption. Intended as a means of reflection and resistance, the film refers to a post-productivist condition of fashion by exposing the limits of production driven by overproduction within the increasingly global market of the 21st century. This film is a part of larger theoretical research entitled Towards a practice of unmaking: a strategy for critical fashion practices, which Portuguese designer Lara Torres is currently carrying on within University of the Arts in London. Her practice-based research debates the role of the fashion designer and questions fashion’s critical agency. Lara Torres emerged as highly experimental fashion designer, who not only created collections conceptualizing processes of fashion making, but she also opened discussion about fashion industry’s ceaseless overproduction/overconsumption chain which is becoming truly Pantagruelian. Her reflective and radically critical stand brought her to decision to orient her practice in a more activist and artistic direction, producing mostly videos, films and texts which pled for a change of ways in which fashion system operates today. In 2011 she realised set of short films entitled “An Impossible Wardrobe for the Invisible” which presented six different cases of “creation through destruction”. In each of six films male and female models would wear dresses which dissolve as they get in contact with water. Simultaneously this acts of “disappearance” become moments of creation: what remains as traces of fabric and contours marked by seams and stitches, becomes effectively a new “garment”, unique and unreproducible. Yet, for Lara Torres it’s the symbolic weight of this gesture of erasure that counts the most: it is her appeal for stoping and reflecting about why and how to make fashion for the future. 

Dobrila Denegri - curator of the exhibition

Transfashional London

09.02. – 04.04.17
London, Austrian Cultural Forum

Transfashional Lab