Past Exhibition
Whitechapel Gallery partners with London Fashion Week and artist and designer Osman Yousefzada to present a screening of his art film ‘Her Dreams Are Bigger’.
Commissioned by Ikon Gallery and launched at Osman Yousefzada’s first solo show ‘Being Somewhere Else’ in 2018, ‘Her Dreams Are Bigger’ shines a thought provoking light on the realities of fast fashion and global concepts of beauty. The film was made possible by the support from eco age and Livia Firth.
In Osman’s words the short film was developed from a trip to Bangladesh where he ‘showed a suitcase full of clothing carrying the label ‘Made in Bangladesh’. These discarded clothes were bought at charity shops in England, to women who worked in the industry. They sat in a circle and started to try on various pieces, taking selfies of each other and posing. I asked them to imagine who their muses were:
“They are tall”, “they look beautiful”, “their hair colour is red”, “they wear different types of dresses which makes them look more beautiful”, “they eat different kinds of food, they only eat fruit, they eat frog, they eat different kinds of snake”, “they’re not black like me, they’re much fairer and very pretty”, “beautiful faces, their lips, they are like dolls”.
The women who make clothes don’t really know who they are making them for. They don’t wear those kinds of clothes, clothes that are put on ships and then off-loaded halfway around the world to wind up in high street stores. That’s fast fashion.’
Osman works at the intersection of art and fashion, combining his multi-disciplinary design practice with a strong sense of social commentary. His work is shaped by a personal consideration of the contemporary fashion world and the industry’s inherent inequalities, juxtaposed with representations associate d with the experience of immigration.
Artist Osman Yousefzada and journalist, writer and BBC reporter, Lucy Siegle present a panel discussion.
