Throughout Garage’s fall exhibition season, the Museum will provide free guided tours for visitors with intellectual disabilities around The Fabric of Felicity—a show that explores the relationship between art and clothing without penetrating the territory of fashion.
The international project The Fabric of Felicity embraces over forty artists representing five continents. During the adapted tour that follows a special route taking into account the specifics of perception by people with intellectual disability and autism, the participants will have the chance to explore the key works of the exhibition as well as the main themes emphasized by the project’s curators.
The exhibition The Fabric of Felicity is set to unveil what is left when the theme of fashion is excluded from the discourse around clothes represented in artworks. What kind of questions will arise in the process of deliberate exclusion of the platform where art and clothes most often meet each other. This show approaches clothing as a constructed image of a person in real world. People do not always make rational choices of particular elements of this image, often influenced by certain fashion industries that control their styles and behavior. “Nonprofessional” outfits, however, are still commonly regarded as a symbolic act of self-expression, while uniforms, alternately, are considered utilitarian (and anonymous).
The exhibition is trying to reveal variability in the contrasts between the anonymous and the individual, between a working dress and a private wardrobe.
The Triumph of Fragility (Триумф хрупкости)—an artwork by the group Fabrika Naidennyh Odezhd (Factory of Found Clothes: Olga Egorova and Natalia Pershina-Yakimanskaya), perhaps exposes the correlation of these areas and meanings in the most contradictory way.
The show also features an archival section that can be found in the Museum’s East Gallery, which traces the concise history of avant-garde experimentations with the idea of total uniform for all life occasions and the search of universal garments in the postwar abstract art.
The exhibition The Fabric of Felicity begins in Garage's cloakroom featuring the works of the Swedish artist Bella Rune created using augmented reality technologies.
Concluding the adapted tour, its participants will be engage in a workshop where each group member will work with textiles creating their own artworks inspired by the works on display at the exhibition. To learn more about adapted tours and prepare your visit to the Museum, please use our social story.