Six highlights of the "strike a pose" festival you can't miss

Where art and fashion marry 

After the brilliant premiere last summer, the "strike a pose" festival will go into the next round from June 24 to 26, 2022 under the motto "Diversity". In 15 collaborative projects, international artists and designers will show ways to merge the disciplines of art and fashion. The venues for "strike a pose" are twelve art venues in Düsseldorf - seven galleries, two off-spaces and two studios as well as the Piazza of the K21, where the collaborations initiated by four Cologne galleries will be shown. Twelve other projects, which will also be launched under the heading "fashion-meets-art," but without being part of the official competition, can also be seen there on Saturday, June 25, 2022, the so-called Fashion Day.  

The festival initiators Ljiljana Radlovic and Robert Danch were keen to show how art and fashion mutually stimulate and challenge each other. The changeability of fashion provides artists with new impulses and its pop-cultural or social references can give art a new and contemporary relevance. Art, in turn, can be a catalyst: a free, detached approach to new techniques, patterns and forms gives fashion wings.  

Exactly what the cross-disciplinary projects that have emerged this year look like will be revealed to the public on Friday, June 24, in the galleries and at K21. The question of which collaborations will ultimately win the two "strike a pose" festival prizes will provide particular excitement. The awards ceremony will take place on Saturday, June 25, starting at 4 p.m. on the piazza of the K21. Here's a preview of what to expect and where at the "strike a pose" festival. 

Wild Palms 

A photo series by Bogotá and Paris-based photographer Karen Paulina Biswell inspired designer Angelika Kammann, founder of the label Société Angelique, to collaborate on "strike a pose." Biswell's work is characterized by formal and conceptual explorations of femininity, sexuality, intimacy, nature and otherness. She photographs analog, which translates into a specific color spectrum and tactile texture in her work. Her series "Ellas" deals with the confrontation with one's own sexuality and poetically shows sections of bodies in connection with transparent materials and natural elements such as plants and flowers. Photos from this series were printed by Kammann on translucent fabrics and turned into sculptural designs. They reflect a return to one's own physicality and are sold as individual artistic pieces as part of "strike a pose." Angelika Kammann, who previously worked as Head of Design at Escada and Wunderkind, among others, focuses on sustainability with her own collection. Titled "Reflexions on Utopia," the collection enters its second season this summer.

Live Lab Studio  

Hahn meets Hornemann: You can catch a glimpse of this exciting collaboration both in the Live Lab Studio, the concept store of Düsseldorf designer Stephanie Hahn, and on the Piazza of the K21. Hahn combines her own fashion label 22/4_HOMMES_FEMMES with the work of goldsmith Georg Hornemann, who has been working at the interface with art for decades. Together, Hahn and Hornemann want to question traditional role models and have created a series of abstract geometric brooches made of gold, silver and acrylic glass in their search for a form of expression that transcends gender. The graphic-minimalist jewelry pieces represent a vision of elegantly expressing individual freedom. The contrasting green, blue, black and white also characterizes the fashion collection by 22/4_HOMMES_FEMMES, which was created in parallel and pays homage to summer. Diamonds on the pins evoke the sparkle of the sea in the sunlight. Add to that airy perforated gold elements and shiny acrylic details, which are also found in the mesh material or shiny accents of the collection. 

Rupert Pfab  

At the Rupert Pfab Gallery in Düsseldorf, the work of Krefeld-born artist Astrid Busch meets that of Düsseldorf designer Hiroyuki Murase. Astrid Busch studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg and at the Berlin-Weißensee School of Art, graduating as a master student of Katharina Grosse. In her collected photographs, she condenses motifs into spatial pictorial arrangements. Some of her photographs are translated into space on various image carriers or even further developed as sculptures. This is exactly what happens in the Koop with the textiles of Hiroyuki Murase. The 1982-born designer, who himself studied sculpture at the Düsseldorf Art Academy but then decided on fashion and founded his label Suzusan in 2008, uses an ancient Japanese textile finishing technique called shibori to dye and pattern his collection. In the shibori process, the fabrics are partially pleated, stitched or tied off. Analogous to the paintings of Astrid Busch, Murase had fabrics in his native Japan processed using ancient shibori techniques in such a way that they pick up on Busch's pictorial aesthetic and translate it into a textile surface.   

The pool 

In Off-Space the pool in the former swimming pool of the Terrassenhaus Tersteegenstraße, designed in 1962 by Düsseldorf architect Paul Schneider-Esleben, his granddaughter Sophia Schneider-Esleben shows a collaboration with the painter, poet and audiovisual artist Emil Schult. Sophia Schneider-Esleben was born in Hamburg in 1988 and founded her own label in 2015 after completing her studies in fashion design. She develops her own fabrics for her sustainable collections, often using watercolors by her grandfather Paul, which she enriches with references from music, art and design. As part of the "strike a pose" festival, Schneider-Esleben cites Emil Schult, the former Beuys student and Richter master student who worked closely with the band Kraftwerk. His most recent works reflect on the connection between the human being, the electronic microcosm and the immeasurable expanse of space. 

Van Horn

In the Düsseldorf gallery Van Horn, the artist Anys Reimann, the fashion designer Samir Duratovic and the gallery owner Daniela Steinfeld have come together for a special contribution. Together with the perfumers of The Scent Company from Cologne, they developed a room and body scent that can be sniffed at the gallery during the festival. Anys Reimann, an engineer in her first life, studied with Thomas Grünfeld and Ellen Gallagher at the Düsseldorf Art Academy until 2022. The artist, who has West African-East Prussian roots, explores themes of origin, gender and skin color in her painterly collages that reflect her bicultural, Afro-European experience. Samir Duratovic, whose parents come from Bosnia, sees his label Boyfrommars1996 as an interdisciplinary artistic means of communication. The basic idea behind the competition entry shown at Van Horn was to create an immaterial work and to choose a medium that everyone shares. The perfume, which is also to go into series production, is called "Poise," which means balance and grace.  

Three  

Cologne's Galerie Drei is showing a collaboration between the artist Anna Virnichs and the fashion designer Annelie Schubert at the Piazza in K21. Anna Virnich's works revolve around textile tableaus whose surfaces the Berlin artist, born in 1984, understands as membranes that leave room for different interpretations. The often manipulative and sometimes even fetishizing handling of the material and a latent presence of the corporeal is evident in objects whose formal composition ranges from symbolic exoticism to stringently calculated pictorial construction. Both the textile and the physical reference in Virnich's works lead to the cooperation with Annelie Schubert. Born in Göttingen in 1987, the German-French fashion designer lives and works in Paris. Her studies led her to the Berlin-Weißensee School of Art, among other places. In 2015, she was awarded the prestigious Grand Prix of the annual fashion festival in Hyères, France. She has worked for Haider Ackermann, Acne Studios and Maison Margiela, among others. 

Cover: Courtesy Société Angelique, Photo: Rafaels Pröll