Fashion & Performance / materiality, meaning, media, Melbourne, 2005
Impression in the space during Fashion & Performance, RMIT design hub, Melbourne, 2015

Fashion & Performance explores the creative territory between fashion, architecture and performance and highlights a community of contemporary practitioners who sit between the disciplines of experimental fashion, clothing and performance.The exhibition includes time based media, garments, installations and a series of live performances. The cross disciplinary artists in this exhibition demonstrate the potential of embodied engagement that draws on an inherent awareness of both fashion and performance within their methodologies and aesthetic. Fashion & Performance; Materiality, Meaning, Media is the outcome of the curators’ individual and collaborative research. The research and resulting exhibition draws from the need to recognise and understand the plurality of messages in worn and performed clothing or fashion within contemporary society and the undeniably tightly interlinked relationship to performance. The work of the artists shown here is selected and discussed outside of commercial imperatives usually associated with fashion and demonstrates to us a commitment to investigate and communicate ideas around dress, body, narrative and performance in ways which go beyond the traditional parameters of fashion or performance. As a building dedicated to design research, interdisciplinary practice and collaborative thinking, Design Hub intends to operate less like a traditional gallery than with the intensity of a studio environment, presenting work in progress and enabling research exchange.

TIME OUT was newly developed for the context of this exhibition and was performed during the opening ceremony and finissage. The exhibition also featured Margret Wibmer’s video ‘Absence of the teamaster’ (2013).


FASHION & PERFORMANCE / materiality, meaning, media / 05.03.2015 – 02.04.2015, RMIT Design Hub, Melbourne, Australia. Video documentation: Marc Morel

Curated by Dr.Jessica Bugg and Anna-Nicole Ziesche in collaboration with the Design Hub curators Kate Rhodes and Fleure Watson.

With works by Anna Baumgart, Maria Blaisse, Ulrik Martin Larsen, Charlotte Gyllenhammar, Imme van der Haak, Bart Hess & Lucy McCrae, B O U D I C C A, Jessica Bugg, Heyniek, Pyuupiru, Luke White & Remi Weekes, Marie and Kristian Schuller, Jacob Kok, Hussein Chalayan, Margret Wibmer, Adele Varcoe, D & K (Ricarda Bigolin and Nella Themelios), Lucy + Jorg Orta, Nirma Madhoo.