An impossible wardrobe for the invisible (Austrian Cultural Forum)

Transfashional is an educational and exhibitive project conceived on the initiative of Austrian Cultural Forum in Warsaw and University of Applied Arts in Vienna. 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.Transfashional began as a series of collaborative sessions in 2016 with fashion designer Hussein Chalayan, curators José Teunissen (Arnheim Fashion Biennial, University of the Arts London ), 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. 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.