UK based artist Lara Torres asks the viewer to stop and reflect about how we make fashion in the future in her video-essay Unmaking. The visual narrative is composed of a series of performative gestures, such as un-weaving, un-sewing and tearing apart in order to become aware of the symbolic meaning of the thread, of the fragment, and of all what remains behind as a material trace of human existence. In a similar way Anna Sophie Berger’s work She Vanished 1 evokes absence, loss, and generally the state of moving away while Ana Rajčević’s work questions possible new beginnings: her wearable sculptures in the form of long horns invoke both ancestral and futuristic dimensions. Kate Langrish-Smith pushes the notion of wearability and functionality even further. Her body-related-sculptures function as enigmatic performative devices which create specific choreography of the movement and body-posture, inviting and teasing spectators to interact with them. Manora Auersperg will present a textile work produced on a loom in situ in which the exhibition itself becomes the object of artistic analysis.

Several artists focus on the potential of materials. For her collection Excuse My Dust Christina Dörfler-Raab experiments with different dying processes using destructive and corrosive substances, while Afra Kirchdorfer creates modular systems composed of ribbons and geometrically cut pieces of cloth which can be endlessly combined and recombined around the body. Assembling the work becomes a playful action of redesigning as well as rethinking the very notion of ready-to-wear.

For their NOUS001 piece graphic designer Maximilian Mauracher and information scientist Bernhard Eiling created a neural network, or digital brain which will be fed by information about how the audience is dressed. Their’s is one of several collaborative projects. Polish artists will present a video animation and interactive installation inspired by celebrathed Austrian author Robert Musil's novel Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß. Their work revolves round the position of being active or passive, both as a citizen and as a creative person in relation to one’s social, political and cultural surrounding. 

Also collaborating on a new work are fashion designer Anna Schwarz and photographer Lisa Edi who explore the dialectical relation between the “eye” of the camera and object of its focus.

Installation views © Lisa Edi