Kindred Spirits and Shapeshifters

curated by Marcelle Joseph

MEGA is pleased to present a section of the fair curated by UK-based curator and collector Marcelle Joseph. As a curator, Joseph has envisioned this section as a group exhibition titled Kindred Spirits and Shapeshifters.

As told through the visual voices of 13 female-identifying and queer artists, this exhibition will demonstrate the power of fashion and its ability to cut a new shape in the world. Fashion deals in the commodification of identity. This exhibition will explore the influence of clothing and other fashion or beauty elements, such as masks, wigs and makeup, on selfhood and its outward expression. In the words of Olivia Laing from a May 2020 article in Elle magazine, ‘what we wear has so much power. Every item in our wardrobe communicates emotions and ideas, subtly or boldly expressing our political stance and point of view. You can dress to conform or to transgress, to fit in or to stand apart.’ From the unconventional silhouettes of Rei Kawakubo’s designs for Comme des Garçons to Dior’s t-shirt with the phrase ‘We should all be feminists’ emblazoned across its chest, fashion can be political and liberating, allowing a person to express their individuality or resist the status quo – from ingrained gender codes to other heteronormative ideals of beauty promoted by the male gaze of the patriarchy.

As Elizabeth Wilson wrote in ‘Fashion and the Postmodern Body’ in Chic Thrills: A Fashion Reader (1992), fashion allows us to

“become actors, inventing our costumes for each successive appearance, disguising the recalcitrant body we can never entirely transform. Perhaps style becomes a substitute for identity, perhaps its fluidity offers an alternative to the stagnant fixity of “old- fashioned” ideas of personality and core identity. Perhaps on the contrary, it is used to fix identity more firmly. Either way, we may still understand dress as one tool in the creation of identities”.

In this exhibition, many of the artists depict clothing or other fashion and beauty elements in their work as a way to demonstrate how dress or style can fashion an identity. These artists use a panoply of different materials from textiles to paint and from photography to printmaking to conjure the shapeshifting magic of fashion.