strike –––– a pose
Miaki Komuro - Hanae Utamura
With the new and interdisciplinary concept, strike a pose – Festival for Art, Fashion and Style will bring together creative positions at the interfaces between art and fashion in a unique way. The festival will take place in Düsseldorf from July 23 to 25, 2021.
The very notion of culture is an artifact created by bracketing Nature off. Cultures—different or universal – do not exist, any more than Nature does. There are only nature-cultures. Bruno Latour
The works of designer Miaki Komuro and visual artist Hanae Utamura, both born in Japan, synchronize nature, art and technology, East and West by means of hybrid interfaces. Under “Strike a pose,” boa-basedonart becomes a laboratory of resonance for this interrelationship.
“Relationship” is the title of Miaki Komuro’s latest collection. The relationship between human and nature is the focus here. The designer follows the principle of upcycling. Decolorized black fabrics from her previous collections are combined and processed with new textiles. In this way, she combines ecological awareness with her love of fashion design and high-quality textiles. This passion is the drive and engine behind the young designer’s label.
Everything from one source is it’s narrative. The design, the cut and processing up to photo production is created and managed by the designer herself. “Form follows function” is her credo. Komuro’s original collections with names such as Restructure or Relationship combine flexibility and comfort with a touch of luxury. The hand-sewn individual pieces embody deceleration and mindfulness in the fast moving world of fashion.
In her artistic practice, Hanae Utamura explores the field of tension between nature and civilization, in particular the relationship between humans, science and nature. She understands and uses her own body as a conduit. It serves her as a transmitter between the conflicts of human and non-human forces. In her “Secret Performance Series” (2010-2013), the artist’s black-clothed figure performs strangely alleged rituals in vast and seemingly uninhabited landscapes, Sisyphus’ acts to tame nature. Deserts and snowfields are swept, raked and brushed, circles are drawn in barren stretches of land. Rituals and actions, in which the physical capacity of humans is pushed to the limits in face of the power of undomesticated nature. To express her artistic concerns, Hanae Utamura uses a variety of techniques and media, including video, performance, photography, and sculpture. Utamura currently lives in Buffalo and Tokyo. In addition to her numerous exhibitions in Europe, Japan, Korea and the USA, she has received the Shiseido Art Egg Award, Tokyo, and has been a visiting artist at the Zeche Zollverein in Essen, Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart and Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, among others.