The “Hackers and Haute Couture Heretics” exhibition investigates how fashion can be hacked, recircuited and transmutated. The participating artists and designers use hacking, shopdropping, and craftivism as tactics used in the outskirts of fashion and explore these methods further through a series of open workshops at the gallery. During the six-week relay the artists and designers taking part in the exhibition propose new ways of operating within the fashion system, reverse engineer the concept of fashion in order to find ways to practically hack it. These artists and designers are not subverting fashion as much as subconstructing it, tuning it, and making its subroutines run in new ways.
To avoid the exhibition to be an isolated art event at Garanti Gallery it was crucial to collaborate with an established and exclusive fashion brand to make a connection between hacking practices and the premier grade dream producers. Thus the exhibition was preceded by the project “Vakko Vamps”, where the participating artists and designers hacked products by the exclusive Turkish fashion brand Vakko. The glossy lifestyle objects of high fashion were reformed into objects representing other possible sides of fashion, products that are now injected back into the Vakko collections as new objects of desire.
The opening party is a Swap-O-Rama-Rama, a public clothes swap and hack. Bring a bag of your old clothes that are dying in the back of your wardrobe and reconstruct them into something new! The Swap will in the night turn into a Sahane fashion party together with Istanbul Street Style.
Workshops every evening 18.00-20.00 at Garanti Gallery!
Exhibition opens at 4th of september.
posted by : regine on 14 Aug 2007
