Ines Doujak

John Barker

The Austrian artist Ines Doujak presents her highly unusual fashion collections. Citing and at the same time calling into question the glamour of the fashion world, Doujak's works are characterized both by their determined criticism and their beauty. The artist brings into play the exploitative structures and the gender and class order hardwired into haute couture and the garment industry and deliberately blurs the demarcation line separating fashion statement and art. The focus is on textile workers burnt to death in their factories, on total exhaustion as the lot of men and women in the low-wage sector, on dirty secrets, animal and human skins, Carnival and masquerade, drugs, war and the devil himself. Motifs and themes are directly inscribed on the textiles as carrier material. Fabrics, patterns, garments and accessories as well as texts, publications, objects, videos, dance interludes and pieces of music deal with the links between fashion, colonialism and globalized relations of production. Exhibition: Württembergische Kunstverein, Stuttgart, Germany (15.10.2016 - 15.01.2017) / Lentos Kunstmuseum, Linz, Austria (2.2. - 21.5.2018).

Loomshuttles, Warpaths, 2010 - 2018

Oliver Ressler

The politics of Utopia have already produced a rich and varied literature - St. Simon, Buber, Bloch, and many others. Utopian Pulse explores this tradition from the perspective of art practice and asks how we can engage with and contribute to it. This book will be published alongside an exhibition of the same name and will include artwork from the exhibition itself. The work's contributors invoke Utopia as an always incomplete alternative and a recognition of something missing, which opens up the possibility of asserting something which is not yet but will be. International artistic researchers, artists and artist-curators contribute different modes of engagement which they are already constituting through their own practice. More than just a theoretical treatise, this book is a companion to a series of works and projects that are brought to life and which the book seeks to document. This book will serve not only as a contribution to the existing literature on Utopia and Utopian politics, but also as an inspiration to artists seeking to realise these ideas through their work.

Ines Doujak

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