Women's History Museum
The Massive Disposal of Experience
Opening: 13 Sep 2022, 6–9 pm
Women's History Museum, The Massive Disposal of Experience, Ausstellungsansicht, CCA Berlin, 2022. Photos: Diana Pfammatter
I sell clothing for a living. I put up a backdrop and get into character. Will you buy my stuff? It is vintage and rare after all.
Experience, the protagonist in Women History Museum’s latest film, The Massive Disposal of Experience, poses for the invisible camera in an array of outfits and in front of blown up, rotating Psychology Today magazine covers.Viewers can hear the old-fashioned clicking sound of the camera apparatus while Experience continues changing outfits – a seemingly aimless activity.
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A few minutes later, Experience is seen wandering around the streets of New York City, again in a new outfit. With new ones appearing at the onset of almost each scene, the outfits themselves emerge as the real stars of the video. Everything and everyone revolves around them.
CCA Berlin is excited to present the first solo exhibition of the New York-based duo Women’s History Museum in Germany. Their new two-channel film The Massive Disposal of Experience will be screened alongside costumes worn by the film’s protagonist, displayed on mannequins next to shopping bags and seats that resemble magazine stacks. Together, they set a scene evocative of abandoned retail spaces and malls extending the film set into the exhibition space.
Women’s History Museum works with recycled materials, vintage clothing, and discarded textiles. The artist duo is interested in the untapped potential for subversion inherent in fashion, as well as its historical importance as an often dismissed site of mostly feminine consumption and creativity. For Women’s History Museum, fashion’s possible intersections and opportunities for critical engagement and feminist resistance informs their artistic enquiries.
Their treatment of clothes involves collage, manipulation, and pastiche, echoing pivotal female art practices all the while marking a distinct authorship on each fashioned garment. At the same time, their work denounces the just-in-time logistics, wasteful overproduction, and labor exploitation symptomatic of the conventional fashion industry, but also that of the global art circuit. Alongside their artistic practice, Women’s History Museum runs an online vintage shop, giving fans and followers the opportunity to access otherwise unattainable designer items – a gesture that blurs and confuses established class divisions and attitudes. Sometimes, vintage clothes sales occur during an exhibition. At other times, the clothes-on-show are activated through performative fashion shows. The duo thus succeeds in engaging not only their immediate community and social network, but also broader publics.
In Berlin, Women’s History Museum will engage with art and fashion students, fellow practitioners, as well as designers and editors so as to situate and expand on their practice.
CCA Berlin’s 2022 program, organized under the title of Pilot, is envisioned as the institution’s exhibitionary testing ground. It will unfold over the course of its first 12 months through individual presentations of existing works by artists. Pilot aims to highlight and revisit works that are significant to the development of CCA Berlin and thereby draw a curatorial blueprint for the institution’s future collaborations and aesthetic enquiries.