AUTUMN CLOTH
Tenant of Culture presents the material and symbolic excretions of fashion in a fossilized state, suspended between archaeology and commodity. Much like trash, her works—often assembled using discarded and recycled shoes, denim, jackets, belts, sweatpants, socks and hats—tell stories inchoately; there is the outline of a plot, but only in the form of a puzzle, fragments of an impossible history. The materials that the artist repurposes into extravagant and fashionable hybrids are both singular objects and the residue of global consumer society, an unfathomable system of billions of objects that only grows day by day. Standing on the heap of its waste pile, carefully sorting through an infinite archive of bygone sartorial desires through second hand shops and eBay, Tenant of Culture works up against a fundamental impossibility: how do we try to make sense of all the debris—the stuff—of permanent capitalist overdrive? Fashioning herself as a ragpicker or scavenger, the artist upcycles discarded materials to speculate the life histories of commodities even if their supply chain is almost entirely obscured by branding – and propose a new symbolic value in the alternative circuit of art.
An der Hülben 3, 1010 Wien
Sophie Tappeiner
TENANT OF CULTURE
12 May 2021 - 26 Jun 2021