We live in a time of the so-called Fast-Fashion, our clothes are produced as cheap goods under large expenditure with violent effects for humans and the environment in developing and threshold countries. After a short wearing time, the garments are sorted out of the cupboards, thrown away or recycled. Mirjam Spoolder takes up this global phenomenon in the solo exhibition ‘Trash versus Treasure’ and deconstructs her own unused garments. Using a seam separator, she opens the individual layers of fabric and models them into new objects that display her hitherto unknown innermost. Mirjam Spoolder will intervene, next to her exhibition at kunsthallekleinbasel, with a catwalk of a different kind in the nearby shopping street Steinenvorstadt.

Mirjam Spoolder questions the boundaries between fashion and art by taking up the cultural history of clothing and our perception. For this collection, her own closet served as a source of the material; she deconstructed the garments, she no longer wanted in red, black and white, with a seam ripper and put the individual pieces together in a collage-like fashion to create new creations. Trash, something unusable and disposable, became a treasure, something new and aesthetically upgraded.

Global mass-produced goods were transformed into original one-offs. Fabrics that had almost never been used fabrics were sewn into garments that whisper a personal story through years of wear whisper a personal story. The artist breaks this intimacy of the personal with installation works that allow us to look behind the shell and question the fundamental manufacturing conditions of the current fashion industry.

Text Ana Vujic

Concept: Mirjam Spoolder
Curator: Ana Vujic
Photographer: Zlatko Micic
Performer: Glynis Ackermann, Anja Bergmann, Nili Shamesh, Khadija Fuentes

Exhibition: 12.10.2019
Performance: 12.10.2019
Artist Talk: 13.10.2019