Performance Art and Fashion: Between Embodied Gesture and Radical Adornment

                                                                                                                                                with Marta Jovanovic

Course Description

This course investigates the fertile intersection between performance art and fashion, exploring how clothing, style, and bodily presence become mediums of expression, resistance, and transformation. From the runway as stage to garments as sculpture, we will trace how artists and designers alike use performance and dress to construct identities, critique norms, and make bold aesthetic or political statements. Participants are encouraged to think critically and creatively about the body as a site of transformation, resistance, and self-exploration and to consider the lenses of embodiment and gesture in doing so. 
The course draws from contemporary and historical examples—from experimental runway presentations to live art interventions—examining how artists and designers such as Rick Owens, Alexander McQueen, Narcissister, Eva & Adele, and Rebecca Horn have redefined the boundaries between art and fashion and prompted critical investigations into notions of identity, symbolism, materiality and the politics of ‘dress’. 
Through discussion, visual analysis, and hands-on assignments, participants will develop a personal performative language and culminate the course with a final live performance.

Learning Objectives:
By the end of this course, students will:
- Understand the historical and contemporary connections between performance art and fashion
- Analyze garments as performative and symbolic tools
- Explore the politics of the dressed body—gender, race, class, and subversion
- Develop a performative piece or wearable work that reflects critical and aesthetic research
 

About Marta Jovanovic

“Jovanovic is truly an artist of the twenty-first century. She can no longer call one country home, after living in Europe, the Middle East and North America. Her practice moves effortlessly between performance, sculpture, video and installation. She is interested in the legacy of feminism, but she also has deep admiration for her male forbears. Are these contradictory stances? They should not be. For identity today is a shifting and transforming process, rather than a fixed state. We have learned from the achievements as well as the mistakes of earlier feminist thought—prescribing what is a liberated feminism from what is not is a futile process. What is more enlightening is to understand that the post-feminist condition allows for a personal quantification of identity, one that is not forced or assigned. This is what our feminist predecessors fought for so bitterly—for our generation to have freedom to make our own choices about our bodies, our art, our lives.” Dr. Kathy Battista – Marta Jovanovic: Performing the Self (2013)