The Unseen: A Precursor Online Exhibition

“The Unseen: A Precursor”

This virtual exhibition, “The Unseen: A Precursor” forms part of Artisan Singapore 2021 – a platform to Discover Fashion Through Art. Visitors to the online gallery can explore emerging artists using contemporary art, photography, performance and decorative art as their medium of choice.
A precursor to our in-person multidisciplinary exhibition to be held later in the year, “The Unseen” has been created to support two important ambitions.

Firstly, the exhibition aims to raise awareness, encourage self-reflection and to start urgent conversations about the impact of fashion on an increasingly fragile ecosystem.
Secondly, we hope to raise enough funds to commission our featured artists to fully explore their chosen practice and create new work for the physical event

About

Fashion is a social process that is intrinsically embedded in our daily life. The decisions we make about the clothes and accessories we wear are unwittingly communicated to the world. These choices speak volumes about our identity, real and projected. Our clothes impart immediate clues as to our socio-economic position, cultural background, conformity or otherness.

Fashion is an articulation of complex systems always at play. From public issues such as the law, government policy and the market; to private issues such as status, gender and self-identification. Our values and allegiances are always on display.

However, this does not extend to a conscious concern about how our clothes are made, or the material they are fashioned from. We allow ourselves to believe in convenient narratives that Art is a political platform for discourse, whilst Fashion is benign or passive. These narratives 'come apart at the seams' when the unseen is revealed.

Thankfully, there is a growing awareness of the many uncomfortable truths about our current linear fashion system. A system that supports the constant purchase of new clothes and the discarding of 'fleetingly fashionable' items every few months [remove which] inevitably leads to an endless cycle of consumerism and 'throw-away' culture.
Understanding fashion as a system requires inference, evaluation, analysis, interpretation and reasoning. These skills are usually only applied in the socio-political structures of commerce, art and media, but are rarely employed when considering what we purchase.

By looking beyond the visible, we can attempt to dismantle consumer ignorance and apathy by provoking reflection and encouraging investigation into the interaction between art, fashion and our environment. In this way, ‘the seen’ can shine a light on ‘the unseen’.

The artists chosen to participate in this exhibition explore various points of articulation - either through individual identity and personal agency or through "seeing” what so often remains unseen. This is evidenced through the visual subjects or themes they feature by questioning the materiality of their own practice, or the very nature of the medium they have chosen to work in.

We invite you to visit the exhibition and pause to consider the artist’s creative expression and how it might lead to a deeper engagement and questioning of your own relationship with the environment beyond simply absorbing the surface pleasure of consumption.

Artisan Singapore's inaugural event was held in 2019.