Berlin, Berlin - everyone has been in Berlin. Me too - but unfortunately, instead of attending the splendid shows and visiting some off-events i was running my feet off with a camera team. We were producing “The Zoo”, a spontaneous, modish question-answer banter on the streets of Berlin - a little online-show that will be aired in October (info’s will follow). Wistfully, I looked at the partygoers and show visitors that filled Berlin´s streets while I was practicing shyness-overcoming with accosting people and interviewing them in front of some cameras.
For a lucid intervall, i was running into Mary and Mahret, but unfortunately, i was in a condition of midsize confusion and on the run to the next location. For those who also missed the shows and events, I heartly recommend the reports and pictures on Pudri, f&art, Les Mads, La Lila and Allet ohne Schminke. From Smeilinener to Strenesse Blue, from Wedding Dress 3, Esmod Show and Elle Fashion Star Party - The blogger ladies did a great job and offer a fantastic overview on what was going on in Berlin.

Picture via Messe Berlin

Don´t worry - there´s some help out there! Mary just recommended and i acclaim: with fashionweek.unlike you´ll be in the know. Get the schedule, read some insider reports and find the kind of information you´ll need for your ultimate fashion inspired Berlin trip. Enjoy!

Screenshot from fashionweek.unlike

Press release:
CIRCLECULTURE GALLERY IS PLEASED TO ANNOUNCE THE FIRST SOLO EXHIBITION OF BERLIN-BASED STREET ARTIST XOOOOX: “MOLOTOV HIGH HEELS”.
OPENING: JULY 17TH 2008, 7PM, EXHIBITION: JULY 18TH UNTIL SEPTEMBER 10TH 2008

XOOOOX has been a prolific graffiti artist since the mid 1990ʼs. Early experiments with collage gradually evolved into the artistʼs signature stencil work, typically life-size figures or appropriated designer logos found predominately on the streets of Berlin and in Paris, Milan, Vienna, New York…
The exhibition will include emblematic stencil work by xoooox, as well as new collage and sculpture made from common materials such as cardboard, flea market furniture, found objects and discarded fashion magazines. A large-scale, public work, will accompany the exhibition.
XOOOOX manipulates immediately recognizable logos of upscale brands like Coco Chanel, re-contextualizing these elitist class signifiers within the inherently egalitarian space of the urban public sphere, while commenting on the visual power of branding in general. Life-sized stencils of females, conspicuously posed and styled as models often are, depict the icons of fashionʼs cult of worship and recall the work of street art legends such as Blek le Rat, Misstick and Banksy, functioning as both traditional figurative studies and ironic representations of societyʼs obsession with the superficial. Although XOOOOXʼs stenciled images are inspired by the fashion spreads seen in magazines such as Vogue and avant-garde publications like Purple, this work is not a deconstruction of couture culture. On the contrary, each stencil, created painstakingly by hand, pays homage to the art form that is couture fashion, while criticizing the massmerchandising and advertising campaigns of global retail chains. Citing Pop Art, DADA and, of course, graffiti as major influences, the artist states, “You can use the power of fashion like a personal weapon. It can act like a shield, or it can destroy you.”

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS:
»Inoperable Poster Show« Vienna, 2007
»Finders Keepers« Milan, 2006
»Hollywood The Remix« New York, 2005
www.xoooox.com

For further information please contact the gallery.
Circleculture Gallery, Gipsstrasse 11, 10119 Berlin Mitte, Germany
berlin@circleculture-gallery.com, www.circleculture-gallery.com

Dresses with little pockets for colored felt-tip pens that bleed into the fabric? At first glance this sounds kind of odd to me. But Portuguese artist Fernando Brizio disabuses me.
As part of the Turin-based exhibition “flexibility - design in a fast changing society” Brizio turns heads with his “renewable clothing”, based on the concept I mentioned before. Surprisingly, the dresses are very beautiful and wearable. And the greatest thing of all: the dresses can be cleaned and colored again…and again…and again. Stunning idea! For more, jump to designboom.

All photos from designboom

Submissions for Diane Pernet´s and Dino Dico´s YOU WEAR IT WELL Contest have to be turned in until 15th July. So, hurry up!

“YOU WEAR IT WELL - In the spring of 2006, Dino Dinco & Diane Pernet discussed the prospects of curating a traveling presentation of short films and videos that investigated the intersection of fashion and film. Furthermore, they wanted to showcase films and videos that were specifically oriented around the issues of fashion, style and / or beauty, rather than exist only as elements of the bigger picture, such as costume design.

Films of this nature are often difficult to come by and are gradually appearing via the Internet, if at all. Dinco and Pernet felt that a global audience existed for these types of films, but that it would be more interesting to create an ever-evolving presentation of these films and screen this presentation in cities around the world. Hence, YOU WEAR IT WELL was born.

Through YOU WEAR IT WELL, Dinco and Pernet sought to unveil the best moving images from international filmmakers, artists, photographers and designers, culled through two degrees of separation from their inner circle of creative friends and acquaintances. Simultaneously, they offered an Open Call for submissions to the world at large, through Pernet’s blog, A Shaded View on Fashion as well as through word of mouth. A small jury of fashion and film professionals assembled to select the best of the best, and the result was a program that put some of the biggest names in the world of fashion next to the inspired work of largely unknown, creative hopefuls. The common thread was a passion and admiration for the magic that can occur when fashion meets the moving image.

To select the best of the Open Call submissions for YOU WEAR IT WELL 2, we were honored to have the following film and art world professionals as our jury: Ned Brown, Executive Producer of HKM / Rockfight; Charlotte Cotton, Curator of Photography, Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and Deborah Irmas, Photography Curator and Documentary Film Producer.”

Picture via YouWearItWell.tv

Radical Advertising - An Exhibition that has to be seen. Online or Live.
It´s shown until august, 17th in Düsseldorf, Germany and online under radicaladvertising. The show includes works by
Cindy Sherman, Zevs, Maison Martin Margiela, and Jeff Koons as well as the famous Adbusters Foundation. The list can be breythless continued with names like Oliviero Toscani, David LaChapelle, Terry Richardson, Banksy andsoonandsoon.
Watch! It´s worth it! Here the official press text:”Both the exhibition and its provocative title show that the transition from the 20th to the 21st century marked a radical paradigm shift in advertising.
Against the backdrop of globalization, the 1990s became the decade of the no-logo movement and ‘ad-busting’, an attack on the cluttering of the semiotic environment with advertising messages.

The fashion industry was instrumental in this regard: not only did it make it fashionable to wear hijacked logos, it also successfully employed anti-advertising techniques in its marketing campaigns. In doing so, it spearheaded a radically changed concept of advertising that successfully incorporated political and artistic attacks on global advertising into its campaigns. The RADICAL ADVERTISING exhibition features ad-buster campaigns, the critical artistic reflections of artists such as Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, Cindy Sherman, and Daniele Buetti, and the opinion-forming campaigns of Benetton, Sisley, Diesel, Helmut Lang, Calvin Klein, and Comme des Garçons.

Many of the advertisements that appeared on billboards or in magazines in the 1980s and 1990s were designed to shock. They not only revolutionised the advertising industry, but also generated heated debates among members of the public. The controversy generated by Benetton, for example, was so intense that some magazines refused to print Benetton advertisements featuring images of death row in American prisons and some retailers stopped stocking Benetton products.

The nineties: radical shock - advertising as a means of attack
The noughties: radical life - advertising as a means of making contact
2010 onwards: radical moral - advertising as a means of co-operation
… these are the central themes of the exhibition.

Since the 1990s, globalization has also produced a fundamental change in the way consumers consume the media. In the 21st century, advertising has reacted to the media overkill caused by the complete fragmentation of television and the advent of the Internet, mobile telephony, and instant messaging with a second, equally radical u-turn: it is withdrawing from mass communication and addressing individuals wherever it encounters them. The relationship with the consumer has changed from being a passive one to being an active one. Buzz marketing, guerrilla advertising, ambient advertising, and Web2.0 have created the participating consumer.

The RADICAL ADVERTISING exhibition will recreate spectacular ambient advertising campaigns in 3-D and introduce the visitor to the advertising world of Web2.0 and Youtube. Exhibits include a MINI that was converted into a hotel room (and parked outside Germany’s World Cup stadiums); a manhole cover that startles the visitor because of the two hands that reach out from beneath it (for Amnesty International); an interactive urinal advertising Frankfurt’s taxi guild; and a dedicated blog written by the popular German comic figure, Horst Schlämmer, advertising Volkswagen products.

Here too, artists launch a subversive and aggressive attack on the world of advertising: Zevs ‘kidnaps’ advertising figures from posters and Tom Sachs ‘crafts’ a model of a McDonald’s fast food restaurant…
… the final campaign highlighted in this series is the one run by American Apparel, a company that chooses not to brand its products with a logo and uses its customers as models in its advertisements. In the spirit of Andy Warhol, everyone in this campaign gets their 15 minutes of fame and it is the consumers who shape the advertisements that seek to encourage them to buy products.

The heart of the exhibition is a Comme des Garçons guerrilla store containing both retro products and the label’s most recent designs. The store will appear at the launch of the exhibition and disappear again when it ends. Although Comme des Garçons has already applied the guerilla store concept in a variety of cities (including Berlin, Singapore, Krakow, and Glasgow), this is the very first time it has used it in a museum. The store rebelliously carries to extremes the notion of the increasingly mercantile nature of museums. It will be surrounded by a wire fence: on one side of the fence, visitors to the store will look out through the wire mesh into the museum, while on the other side, visitors to the museum will catch glimpses of the glittering world of consumerism through the wire barrier.
The term ‘radical’ covers both meanings of the word: ‘radical’ in the sense of revolutionary and ‘radical’ in the opposing sense of fundamental or absolute. This is exactly what the RADICAL ADVERTISING exhibition is about: advertising’s fundamentally different approach, an approach that is revolutionary because it turns the fundamental principles of the system upside down.

The RADICAL ADVERTISING exhibition uses numerous examples to illustrate the history of shock advertising and employs the shortest-lived examples of the genre to bring visitors not only close to, but actually into pop-up stores and guerilla marketing campaigns.
The 400-page exhibition catalogue (on sale for only € 29.90!) contains essays by Werner Lippert, Peter Wippermann, and Diederich Diederichsen, hundreds of photos, and countless interviews by Hermann Vaske with radical advertising protagonists such as Renzo Rosso (Diesel), Oliviero Toscani (Benetton), Kalle Lasn (the founder of Adbusters), and other creative minds from around the world.

The pop band MIA and its sin

ger Mieze provide a completely different perspective on the exhibition. Visitors can listen to MIA’s exhibition guide using any Bluetooth-equipped mobile phone or watch it as a podcast on the NRW-Forum website (www.nrw-forum.de).”

All Photos by radicaladvertising

“The art festival URBAN AFFAIRS is pleased to announce a large-scale exhibition featuring current positions of Contemporary Urban Art and Street Art from July 5th to August 3rd in Berlin- the global epicenter of this international art movement. Forty-two artists from nine countries, all major players in the Urban Art genre, have been invited for a three-day residency at The Friedrichshoehe, a new cultural center in Berlin-Friedrichshain. Located in a post-industrial building, this 900 sq. meter exhibition space is the ideal location for the largest and most comprehensive Urban Art exhibition in Germany to date.”

Press release by/ More infos at Circleculture.com

As an interdisciplinary wiredancer Miguel Martinez is one of the kind of people you almost meet everywhere, that are involved in a hughe amount of subcultural activities, that are in the know of the now and that always make you ask: what else do they do?

For example: Photos - and exhibitions.
Tomorrow, Miguel Martinez first solo exhibition will be opened at Elektrohaus Hamburg.
As a professional multitasker - Martinez connects industry with subculture, art with money, brands with style, music with people and ideas with implementation and it goes without saying that he´s moving, shaking, checking and watching a lot.

Since 5 years, a mini digital camera is his permanent companion. Through night and day, in private and professional life. As an autodidact, Miguel Martinez, soon developed strong photography skills and an own, distinct style.  With an affectionate focus on details, a love for architectural and industrial shapes as well as for moods, styles and people, Martinez created an assorted portfolio that soon gained recognition and approval through the internet and led to various publications in on- and offline media.
Last, Martinez was featured with a photo documentation about Bar 25 in Bang Bang Berlin Magazine and contributed as a jury member at the 1/Award by Pilsner Urquell.  Tomorrow, we finally see his first exhibition with selected photographs.  While not attempting to be a “real” photographer, Martinez shows us day by day on his flickr portfolio how professional and intense - sometimes silly, sometimes touching - but always entertaining street photography can be.

Photo via Miguel Martinez