| NOW | Victor Papanek The Politics of Design

With the exhibition »Victor Papanek: The Politics of Design«, running from 29 September 2018 to 10 March 2019, the Vitra Design Museum will present the first large retrospective focussing on the designer, author, and activist Victor J. Papanek (1923–1998). Papanek was one of the twentieth century’s most influential pioneers of a socially and ecologically oriented approach to design beginning in the 1960s. His key work, »Design for the Real World« (1971), remains the most widely read book about design ever published. In it, Papanek makes a plea for inclusion, social justice, and sustainability – themes of greater relevance for today’s design than ever before. The exhibition includes high-value exhibits such as drawings, objects, films, manuscripts, and prints, some of which have never before been presented. These are complimented by works of Papanek’s contemporaries from the 1960s to 1980s, including George Nelson, Richard Buckminster Fuller, Marshall McLuhan, or the radical design initiative ‘Global Tools’. Contemporary works from the areas of critical and social design provide insight into Papanek’s lasting impact.

Click for more information.

| HERO | Taslima Akhter

Taslima Akhter is a Bangladeshi photographer and garment worker activist. Through her documentary yet sympathetic lens, severe conditions in which clothing workers in Bangladeshi struggled are exposed and structural oppression of the fashion industry under close examination. With activist Kalpona Akter, who is listed BoF500 this year, Akhter is another crucial female who helps promote social awareness in the profit driven industry.

Stitching Together: Garment Workers in Solidarity is a show featuring her photographic works alongside quilts that are made out of material donated by the victims’ relatives.

The exhibition is on view in Photoville at Dumbo through September 23. Click to see more info about the exhibition.

| Sunday Reading | Press & Fold Magazine

Press & Fold is an emerging fashion magazine that delivers “notes on making and doing fashion” from Netherland. It released its debut issue titled “The Street” in February 2018.

Co-founded by the Dutch fashion designer slash researcher Hanka van der Voet, “the bi-annual publication provides a platform for critical fashion practitioners who do not obey the rules the fashion system is currently dictating.” As it claims on its website, the Rotterdam-based editorial practice celebrates singular fashion discourse that operates beyond the notion of “fashion as commodity”.

Check out it out!

| Sunday Reading | We Margiela (2017)

This Sunday, our Journal is dedicated to a movie released last year by the Dutch filmmaker and fashion researcher Menna Laura Meijer.

We Margiela (2017) is a documentary that “tells the untold stories of the enigmatic and singular fashion house of Maison Martin Margiela”. Produced by the Dutch  documentary company Mint Film Office, the movie reveals rare footage of the obscure early years of the studio, including an interview with the co-founder Jenny Meirens. As the less-known history of the legendary label unfold, We Margiela explores the notions of creativity, authorship and financial success in fashion industry today.

http://wemargiela.com/#home

| FLASHBACK | Exhibition ‘September 11’ Commemorated Otherwise

Back in 2011, exactly a decade after the tragedy, a contemporary art show titled “September 11” was open in MoMA PS1. While many other cultural institutions across the States exhibited heavy sentimentalism in their commemorative events, Peter Eleey, curator of the ‘September 11’, adopted a much sober approach, deliberately shying away from any images of the towers, the plane, the smoke and the wreckage. Instead, the exhibition presents only one work made in direct response to the attacks by Ellsworth Kelly, in which the artist proposes to cover the Ground Zero with a simple mound of glass, and another 70 works by 41 artists largely made prior to the event.

Images of the attacks, Eleey argues, ‘were political images from the moment of their making’ and that is why they were not included. The gesture of remembrance without subsuming oneself  under the mainstream rhetoric of jingoism was something the show had taught us.

Here is a review of the exhibition by Steven Stern from Frieze.com.

Ellsworth Kelly, Ground Zero, 2003, image courtesy Whitney Museum of American Art