Event 2: Making Strange: Gagawaka & Postmortem

      Upon stepping into the exhibition room of “Making Strange: Gagawaka & Postmortem” at the UCLA Fowler Museum, I was immediately in awe with the bizarreness of Vivian Sundaram’s work. Separated into two distinct exhibitions on the opposite ends of the hall,  “Gagawaka is consisted of mannequins dressed in outfits made from recycled materials and medical supplies while “Postmortem” on the other hand is comprised of abstract sculptures of anatomical models. Between the two, I enjoyed the “Gagawaka” exhibition significantly more as I personally found “Postmortem” to be a little morbid and disquieting.

      Rather than the usual high fashion attire seen on runaways, the mannequins in the “Gagawaka” exhibition donned garments made from day to day recycled materials. As Sundaram said, garment is about bringing the body delight and pleasure in the surface. These seemingly playful displays are in fact subversive to the materialistic and glamorous fashion world. Utilizing common and unthinkable materials such as red undergarments, cotton jockstraps and rubber bicycle tire-tubes, Sundaram reinvents the conventional forms of haute couture while exploring the concept of pleasure that fashion supposedly brings.

       

              
                                                                            
               

      On the opposite spectrum of surface beauty, Sundaram illustrates the illness that haunts the inner human body with strangely positioned anatomical models, as the title of the exhibition suggested. These dummies and wooden props are in no way accurate representation of the human body but rather, it captures fragility of human life.

      Overall, this exhibition is highly visually stimulating. Although the two bodies of work seem to have no correlation at all, these two projects in fact reflects the inseparable relationship between fashion and the human body. Contrasting beauty and illness, pleasure and pain, life and death, I think that Sundaram’s imaginative exhibition is very refreshing.