The Strike a pose festival for art, fashion and style, which was launched in 2021, will take place again this year after successful previous years, from June 2nd to 4th in the K21 festival center of the North Rhine-Westphalia Art Collection in Düsseldorf and at other locations .
In 2023, the festival will address the question “How do we want to live in the future?” and show various forms, demands and approaches of protest in fashion and art and is also dedicated to sustainability, namely as an idea, social movement and political force.
For this purpose, the label Marke by designer Mario Kein shows cooperations with the digital artist Mara Rudnick and artist Yannic Hohaus in the project rooms The pool. The sustainable “New Luxury” concept store Live Labs Studios presents the young, non-gender-specific label Toni, which reuses old fabrics in new ways.
Fashion designer Adrian makes hats out of towels, jackets out of wool blankets, and garments out of various second-hand fabrics like tablecloths, curtains, and sheets. There is also an accompanying exhibition on the subject of Zero and fashion at the Zero Foundation.
Strike a pose 2023 at different venues
As an extension this year, Strike a pose will also take place in the NRW-Forum Düsseldorf with an exhibition by Israeli designers and artists as well as an evening event and presentation in the Philara Collection and a symposium on the topic “Protest – Between Utopia and Dystopia”. on Sunday at the telecommunications provider Sipgate.
Projects by invited artists from the fashion and textile industries include Iranian-Canadian artist and designer Maryam Keyhani with an oversized, surrealistic hat that becomes an outfit; Venera Kazarova with costumes made of paper, and the Düsseldorf lingerie label Opaak. This invited twelve photographers to address political and/or socially current topics such as the sexualization of the female body, equality, ideals of beauty, motherhood or sustainable value creation in their work.
As part of the supporting program, the artist Simon Freund will continue his performative-photographic series “Portraits” in the K21 on Saturday, in which he slips into other people’s clothes and makes self-portraits. Daria Nazarenko will examine activist practices in her dance performance.
In the Philara Collection, artist Thomas Scheibitz and the Düsseldorf fashion label Suzusan conceived a collaborative project. In addition, on Friday evening the Israeli artist Gili Avissar will explore the relationship between body and space with self-sewn costumes and large ceremonial textiles.
Strike a pose was conceived by Ljiljana Radlovic and Robert Danch, who have been organizing the Düsseldorf Cologne Open Galleries gallery weekend for 15 years. The Ministry of Economics, Industry, Climate Protection and Energy of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia is the main sponsor of the third edition. The Strike a pose festival is to be continued in the coming year and will take place once a year.