Ada M. Patterson
Ada Pinkston
Ania Hobson
Boris Camaca
Ella Yolande
Ifeyinwa Joy Chiamonwu
Louise Giovanelli
Maria Szakats
Rooy Charlie Lana
Zainab Fasili
MEGA proudly presents Kindred Spirits and Shapeshifters, a section of the second edition of the art fair curated by UK-based independent curator Marcelle Joseph. Kindred Spirits and Shapeshifters is a group exhibition about the power of fashion and its ability to cut a new shape in the world, as told through the visual voices of ten female-identifying and queer artists. Fashion deals in the commodification of identity. This exhibition explores the power of clothing or other fashion or beauty elements, such as masks, wigs and makeup, to communicate who a person hopes to become. 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’.