Every season more fashion designers decide to opt for a different approach rather than choosing conventional fashion week presentations or runway shows.
London-based Osman Yousefzada, for example, decided to shun the runways at London Fashion Week and present instead his short movie "Her Dreams Are Bigger" (2018).
Screened in collaboration with the Whitechapel Gallery and Livia Firth, "Her Dreams Are Bigger" focuses on key issues linked with the fashion industry and invites viewers to ponder about fast fashion, beauty and the condition of women workers.
The film was inspired by a trip to Bangladesh during which the designer took with him a suitcase of "Made in Bangladesh" clothes that he had got from charity shops in the UK. He presented them to the women working in local factories who usually make these cheap items.
Yousefzada witnessed the women trying on the clothes, taking selfies and posing, while talking about the wearers of such clothes, that, they imagine as some mythical creatures with red fierce hair and doll-like lips who mainly eat fruit. These workers make the clothes, but they are not allowed to try them on, so they can only imagine who they are making these clothes for.
One of the women highlights in the film how she has little money and hence harbours in her heart only "small dreams", a statement that makes you ponder about the condition of these workers who seem to think that you can have grand dreams only if you are rich enough to afford them.
The film was first screened in 2018 as part of an exhibition at Birmingham's Ikon. At the time the gallery invited Osman Yousefzada to create a show for them, thinking they would have got a conventional fashion event that mainly featured clothes. Yousefzada surprised them instead, coming up with a walk-through art installation – "Being Somewhere Else" – based on his own experience of migration, but also looking at related themes like male dominance and domestic violence.
The fashion designer is the son of conservative working-class Afghani-Pakistani parents (his father was a carpenter and his mother ran her dressmaking business from her bedroom) who migrated to Birmingham in the 1970s.
Rather than being just another fashion exhibition in a gallery, that first event turned into a proper art event with some strong links with the fashion industry and with strong connections with key social issues such as migration and the condition of migrant women.
The film, accompanied by another work, "Huis-clos (No Exit)" (2020), consisting in the internal structure of an Eastern grave, elevated to include an area for contemplation (so that viewers can use it as place to meditate upon loss and mourning), is currently part of "A Rich Tapestry", a collateral project curated by Jonathan Watkins and Aisha Khalid at the Lahore Biennale (until 29th February 2020).
Developing in three different venues, " A Rich Tapestry" features artwork by four artists – Mahtab Hussain, Matthew Krishanu, Farwa Moledina and Osman Yousefzada, alongside two prominent Pakistani artists, Ali Kazim and Imran Qureshi.
While Krishanu's paintings look at his personal experiences and childhood memories (he was born in Bradford, then lived in Bangladesh and moved back to England when he was 12), Hussain explores identity, heritage and displacement with striking images from his "Going Back Home to Where I came From" (2016) and "Honest With You" (2009 – ongoing) series.
The series feature architectural images, but also portraits of people and of British Muslim women, these images featuring strong young women explore the sense of identity and the motivation behind choosing to wear the veil or rejecting it.
Yousefzada's work is not the only one included in this event that displays some connections with fashion: Farwa Moledina, a Muslim woman raised Dubai and now living in Birmingham, tackles feminism, faith and issues about women of colour via her images.
The photographic series "No one is neutral here" and "You must choose your part in the end" (2020) – titles inspired by the poem "I have a seat in the Abandoned Theatre" by the late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish – both try to reclaim Orientalist imagery of Muslim women, and feature an anonymous woman photographed at the Ayasofya (Hagia Sofia) in Istanbul, wrapped in intricate traditional textiles.
Lahore-based artists Kazim and Qureshi presented for the occasion site-specific installations in a disused brick factory: the former made thousands of unbaked clay birds inspired by Farid ud-Din Attar's poem "The Conference of Birds"; the latter created a series of large blocks made from thousands of sheets of printed crumpled paper that will then be made in terracotta clay and baked in the brick klin.
Aisah Khalid, whose paintings, murals and site specific installations revolve around themes of displacement, violence – both domestic and geopolitical – and gender politics, for this occasion offered her studio as a space to share with the other artists involved in this event.
For the British artists involved in this exhibition in Lahore, "A Rich Tapestry" is conceived as a mini-residency that should help them widening their professional horizons, but for Osman Yousefzada it is another step towards the confirmation that, if fashion ever loses him as a designer, art will gain him as an artist with a brave voice and intriguing stories to tell.
Image credits for this post
1. Osman Yousefzada, Being Somewhere Else (2018), Installation Ikon Gallery
2. Installation view, Lahore Biennale, A Rich Tapestry curated by Jonathan Watkins and Aisha Khalid, 2020 © Ikon Gallery
3. Osman Yousefzada, Huis-clos (No Exit) (2020)
4. Mahtab Hussain, Mangla Dam, from the series Going Back Home to Where I Came From (2016) © Mahtab Hussain Lahore Biennale, A Rich Tapestry curated by Jonathan Watkins and Aisha Khalid, 2020 © Ikon Gallery
5. Mahtab Hussain, Red hijab, red dress and bling, from the series Honest With You (2009-ongoing) © Mahtab Hussain Lahore Biennale, A Rich Tapestry curated by Jonathan Watkins and Aisha Khalid, 2020 © Ikon Gallery
6. Farwa Moledina, No one is neutral here (2020), Image courtesy the artist
7. Farwa Moledina, You must choose your part in the end (2020), Image courtesy the artist
8.
Ali Kazim
Conference of birds (2020)
Lahore Biennale, A Rich Tapestry curated by Jonathan Watkins and Aisha Khalid, 2020 © Ikon Gallery
9. Imran Qureshi, Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust (2020), Image courtesy the artist
10 and 11.
Imran Qureshi
Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust (2020)
Lahore Biennale, A Rich Tapestry curated by Jonathan Watkins and Aisha Khalid, 2020 © Ikon Gallery
12. Installation view, Lahore Biennale, A Rich Tapestry curated by Jonathan Watkins and Aisha Khalid, 2020 © Ikon Gallery
13. Aisha Khalid, DIVIDED (2017), Triptych, gouache on wasli paper, Courtesy the artist
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