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Sarah Charlesworth's Art of Personal Religion

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Asher Levine’s biker jacket prototype pays homage to the utilitarian functions of its classic predecessors: it incorporates pockets, zippers and hardware, and is made from flexible polymers with padded shoulders that serve to protect its wearer with a “second skin.” The white jacket, designed for women, includes embedded LED lighting that communicates with the rider’s motorcycle via Bluetooth to create a traffic signaling system, improving rider visibility and safety. Building on his work designing stage garments for performers such as Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift, Levine’s prototype biker jacket is both a novel wearable technology and an aesthetic shift that expands the expressive possibilities for the leather jacket. Since its inception, the biker jacket has imbued its wearers with an indefinable aura of “cool”—whether through the risk-taking pursuit of fast motorbikes or the performance of toughness associated with leather in popular culture. The silhouette, color, and texture of Levine’s prototype play with this heritage and, together with the lighting system, forge new, performative identities for those that dare to don the biker jacket.

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Designer Zhijun Wang on the Sneaker Mask

Surgical masks were introduced at the turn of the 20th century, worn by medical professionals to prevent transmission of disease-causing microorganisms. The flu pandemic of 1918 brought them into the public sphere, as populations donned them to stay safe from infection. Recently, global health emergencies have grown to encompass air pollution, which is especially concentrated in rapidly industrializing cities across Asia. Many city dwellers have come to adopt surgical masks as barriers against dangerous airborne particulate matter. Frustrated by the untenable levels of pollution in his native Beijing, designer Zhijun Wang has found inspiration in sneakers. He cuts them apart and repurposes them as heavy-duty and stylish air filtration masks dubbed Sneaker Masks. In this way, Wang trades on the cultish obsession with sneakers, and the surprise of seeing sought-after examples transformed, to raise awareness of pollution.

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Mariam Magsi -

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Behnaz Babazadeh is an Afghan-born artist who moved to North America as a child, and from a young age was made aware of how her cultural garments were perceived in the West. She soon realised that the burka, which for centuries has been one of many local fashions among Afghan women, is seen as a destructive tool of subjugation in her new Western home. Modern-day interpretations of the burka, from both the West and the Taliban, have replaced the original significance of the garment. As an adult, Babazadeh’s work challenges the ethnocentric universality of the West, and she aims to shine a light to how the burka is misrepresented. Two examples of her work are ‘Candy Series’ and ‘Burka Diaries’, collections designed to critique the assumption that burkas are a threatening and ominous symbol of oppression.

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Princess Hijab - 

Princess Hijab is a Paris-based street artist who tags ads in the city's metro stations, especially those ads that feature scantily clad women's bodies, which I think at this point in our culture are all ads. And she uses, if you look at closely, she uses a very pedestrian tool to do so. She uses a simple thick black marker to veil these women in black. And again, I'd like to quote the artist in her own words about why she chooses to veil these women in this ads. Princess Hijab says, I choose the veil because it does what art should do. It challenges, it frightens, and it reimagines. And I think what she's challenging us to ask is a very simple question. And that is, when, and why, and how do we continue to normalize the hypersexed body, to normalize the hyper-sexualized body, but it is the covered body that jars us? It is the covered body that stops us and gives us pause. 

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Mourning and burial rituals have fascinated designer and scholar Pia Interlandi for much of her career. Participating in the burial dressing of her grandfather spurred her to focus on how we dress our deceased. Taking the concept of the Little Black Dress as her model for the MoMA prototype, she created the Little Black Death Dress. Her dress incorporates the classic principles of its archetype—versatility, sophistication, and understated glamour—to form, in her words, a garment “to carry one from this world to the next.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbJtT7Kbs34

Interlandi conceived the Little Black Death Dress to decompose along with its wearer, since all of its component materials are biodegradable. By using fabric responsive to body heat, she offers the bereaved an opportunity to leave their mark upon the shrouded body. Wherever they touch the dress, their warm hands turn it from black to white, creating an imprint.

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in collaboration with pharrell williams, G-Star reveals the ‘RAW for the oceans‘ collection made from bionic yarn: an eco-thread of fibers derived from recycled plastic bottles. the autumn/winter 2014 series is at the forefront of sustainable fashion, comprising of men’s and women-wear to support the ecological issue of ocean waste. using the technology to not only retrieve plastic from the oceans, but transform it into a new generation of denim, the initiative by G-Star collected and innovated more than 10 tonnes of the problematic sea plastic.

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"Through an engagement with biology I'm really excited about how we can think about organisms like microbes as the factories of the future," says Lee. "What most people know BioCouture for is a series of garments that were grown using bacteria. So the fibres, the material itself and the formation of the garment has been done by a microbe rather than a plant."

In future, Lee believes that clothing materials themselves could be living organisms that could work symbiotically with the body to nourish it and even monitor it for signs of disease.

"What we have right now are living organisms making us materials, but then the organism is killed and the material just exists like any other," she says.

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Miyake and Fujiwara's A–POC (A Piece of Clothing) Queen Textile is an innovative outfitting system that produces self–tailored clothing through mass production, a marriage of systems that seem inherently at odds. An industrial weaving machine is preprogrammed to spin an enormous, continuous tube of fabric. A repeating pattern of seams is woven into the tube, creating a patchwork of shapes whose outlines begin to suggest dresses, shirts, socks, gloves, and hats. The customer can cut along the seams without destroying the tubular structure of each individual item. The result is a puzzle of monochromatic articles of clothing that leaves behind virtually no wasted material.

Each item is designed to be slightly oversized when cut from the roll, allowing users to further customize their garments with scissors—sleeve length, bias, and neckline are just a few of the possibilities. By making the wearer the ultimate designer of the outfit, Miyake and Fujiwara's rapid, efficient, and infinitely customizable system pushes conventional textile technology and creates everyday clothing that transcends ephemeral fashion trends.

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According to the United Nations Environment Program, the Democratic Republic of the Congo is Africa’s most water-rich nation. Yet, in recent years, more than seventy percent of the country’s population has faced an acute shortage of clean drinking water. Chéri Samba has long been focused on issues affecting Congolese society, and in his painting, Water Problem, he addresses this issue. The artist represents himself on a rocket leaving Earth to look for water on Mars. In the text above, he writes the title of his painting in three languages (French, Lingala, and English) and goes on to narrate his quixotic quest: “Where to find water?....Concerned for his people suffering from dehydration, Chéri Samba goes looking for water on planet Mars, as if there wasn’t any water left on Earth. Yes...it is necessary to spend million[s] of dollars to better serve his people in 100 years.” By proposing an obviously unrealistic solution to the water problem, Samba underscores how urgently we must adjust our relationship with the environment and one of its most precious resources.

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Jenny Holzer works with words: scrolling across LED signs, projected onto buildings, and printed on T-shirts, to name only some of her formats. The sentence emblazoned on this jumbo sign in Times Square, ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE, first appeared in a list of Truisms that Holzer wrote in 1977, made into posters, and pasted around Manhattan. These statements range from witty (ELABORATION IS A FORM OF POLLUTION) to poetic (ALL THINGS ARE DELICATELY INTERCONNECTED) to dark (EVEN YOUR FAMILY CAN BETRAY YOU).      Holzer is interested in drawing our attention to the many struggles and complexities of being human, including our power dynamics. Putting forward a variety of perspectives, she aims to move and provoke. By placing phrases on everyday items or screens normally reserved for advertisements, she co-opts common marketing strategies and sends her messages far out into the world.

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Ralph BorlandSuited for Subversion (Prototype)

This civil-disobedience suit, to be worn by street protesters for protection against police batons, draws attention to the risks demonstrators face in order to defend their convictions. A wireless video camera mounted over the head acts as a witness, recording police action. A speaker in the center of the chest amplifies and projects the wearer’s heartbeat. In a group action, when many people are wearing these suits, the increasing heartbeats

become audible as tension and excitement mount, like a natural soundtrack arousing the crowd. At the same time, the heartbeat exposes the vulnerability of the individual and the fragility of the human body exploited as a shield—almost as a weapon—against police munitions.

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Luther Price once described the value of process: “It’s not always about what you are working on…..but how it gets there.” It took him seven years and 80 handmade slides to get to his collage-film, Sorry. Like large portions of his work—encompassing performance, films, and slides—Sorry includes scenes of suburban family life melded, in this case, with a 1940s film about Jesus and the Crucifixion.Before Sorry, Price crafted new films out of recombined old films, manipulating the celluloid in a variety of ways. In the early 2000s, he shifted his energy to slides, which he refers to as “little collage pieces,” sandwiching together snippets of film with leaves, dead insects, ink, and detritus. He sequenced the slides into narratives, with Sorry among his first. “……….It’s an old story …..told over and over and over again………..,” he wrote of the work’s subject. “I’m just telling it one more time…….”

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Anicka Yi’s Shameplex features seven rectangular Plexiglas boxes filled with a shallow layer of ultrasonic gel, typically used during medical ultrasounds. Nickel-plated straight pins sit suspended within the gel in various geometric patterns. As time goes on, the pins begin to corrode, progressively generating a red, rusting pattern. Like so much of Yi’s work, Shameplex reveals the messy, if surprisingly beautiful, edges of technology and biology—the algorithms that drive the cycles of our life and sensory perceptions. As Yi says, “I think that the role of the artist is really, quite frankly, as much as a scientist, to define what life is and what life can be.”

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Ciudad Juárez sits along the U.S.-Mexico border. For this and other reasons that mortician-turned-artist Teresa Margolles has tried to discern, the city became a key transit point for smuggling drugs into the U.S. and a site of much gang warfare and violence. Margolles feels deeply connected to this place and its residents, including the transgender sex workers who pose at the center of her photographic series, Pista de baile (Dance Floor). The dance floors, however, no longer exist. The clubs that contained them were razed by the city in the name of redevelopment, displacing the workers and patrons who found community there. Margolles captures the workers amid the dust and rubble, standing on what little patch remains of the dance floor.

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A collaboration between German architect Manuel Herz and a group of weavers from the artists’ collective National Union of Sahrawi Women, this hand-loomed wall panel depicts a map of the Rabouni refugee camp, which serves as the administrative center for a network of camps clustered in southwestern Algeria. These camps house the Sahrawi people, who fled a war with Morocco that broke out in their home territory of Western Sahara in 1975. Although the fighting ended in 1991, Western Sahara remains disputed and the Sahrawi remain in limbo.The map highlights Rabouni’s ministries, signifying a semi-autonomous government that oversees education, defense, construction, and other areas essential to any nation. So while they wait to reclaim a permanent place in Western Sahara, the Sahrawi have built the components of their future nation-state.