Gyula Muskovics, “Fashion as World-Building in the Years of Post-Communist Transition”, lecture
2 June 2023, 19:30
BERLIN, COSTUMES AND COLLAPSE, ARCHIVE
The lecture examines the artistic works of Tamás Király (1952-2013), an influential underground artist from Hungary who combined fashion with various art forms on the catwalk and beyond during the 1980s and 1990s. Király's playful, gender-bending performances in Budapest during the final years of State Socialism will be briefly introduced, and a 7-minute video documenting Király's visionary collection at the Dressater—Dressed to Thrill show in 1988 at Hamburger Bahnhof will be presented in honor of the late artist's work in Berlin. The lecture also touches on the avant-garde fashion scenes of the former East, highlighting large-scale and multi-disciplinary fashion events that emerged in the cultural capitals of the Eastern Bloc during the collapse of the Soviet Union. Examples such as the Avant-Garde Fashion Assembly in Tbilisi and the Untamed Fashion Assembly in Riga will be discussed to illustrate the world-building capacity of underground and experimental fashion during the post-communist transition.
Language: English
Duration: 30 minutes
Doors open at 19:00. Lecture starts at 19:30.
Gyula Muskovics is a Budapest-based curator, writer, and artist, a co-founder of the performance art group Hollow. His works and publications are motivated by a pull toward the edge and revolve around subversion, queer desire, intimacy, and the political potential of the body. His research is centered on avant-garde and underground fashion in Eastern Europe in the 1980s and 1990s.