The Lost Runway London 2010
The Lost Runway
part of the residency series "...Louder than Bombs" Stanley Picker Gallery Kingston University London in collaboration with the Live Art Development Agency February 16th - 20th 2010
For video documentation see The Lost Runway Stanley Picker Gallery
Special Thanks to
Curators: David Faulkner & Jackie Thomas of Stanley Picker Gallery, London
Jane Talbot, project manager & assistant
Stacey Grant & Maja Polakova
Manuel Vason, photographer
Poonam Mesuria, photographer
The BA Fashion students of Kingston University
Performance artists: Barbara Dean, Rachel Parry, Yoshiko Shimada & Spike Mclarrity
The Live Art Development Agency London
The Lost Runway is a large scale collaborative project commemorating lost women and girls. A week long workshop process generates a collection of sculptural costumes and culminates in a runway/catwalk performance dedicated to each lost girl represented.
Each costume is a live personal monument worn for a lost girl and embodies the story of her life and identity in a visual, sculptural and performative way. Using the conventions of dress and a fashion show format, The Lost Runway becomes an ideological space where beauty and desire are more urgent for their link with loss and longing. Each lost woman and girl represented is memorialised and endowed with power and presence. The work is a testimonial to lost lives and the life-long seeking of their friends and families. The work gives public form to, and performs private memory in the service of human freedom and the right to the protection of life.
Each costume embodies qualities of the person, not as a literal illustration of her life or identity but as a larger metaphor confronting cultures of violence against women and translating each individual story into a universal context. Each lost woman or girl’s image and story are sourced from the internet and are available as public information. This art project functions to further publicise their fates and to benefit campaigns for their retrieval.
The Lost Runway is an artistic and subjective response to the conditions of lost women and girls using real identities, for the benefit of their stories and the wider context. It is sensitive, poetic and challenging. This project functions as a type of discourse on an issue that really matters and it occupies the space of art, a symbolic space that has power to give the idea context, responsibility and agency. As an art work it seeks to transforms the people, images and situations represented.