Although best known as a fashion designer, Hussein Chalayan is also master of the art of video
WITH five videos by Hussein Chalayan being simultaneously projected on its walls, the Archimede Staffolini Gallery teems with a chaos of images and a cacophony of sounds. In a move away from fashion design, Chalayan has taken to the screen and generated a series of works that seem to document the loss of a stable past and an increasingly fragmented existence.
But while it may be helpful to thematically characterise and order the five distinct videos, it would be wrong to think of them as a coherent, continuous whole. Though the medium is the same, certain motifs recurrent, and significations unfailingly slippery and prolific, one feels and perceives something quite different with each of Chalayan’s videos.
To further disrupt presumptions of coherence and continuity, the exhibition has neither a definite beginning nor a definite end. Although the videos are loosely arranged by chronology on the gallery’s three walls, visitors are not bound to the selected order. They may begin where they choose and sample the works accordingly, perhaps watching some repeatedly and only fragments of others.
On my visit to the gallery, I began, quite fortuitously, with Chalayan’s 2003 Temporal Meditations. Perhaps the most accessible of the five videos, it is also the most explicitly concerned with the ambiguity and fragmentation of contemporary Cypriot identity. The objects of ritual and tradition, such as the backgammon board or the miniature coffee cups, predominate in the piece to affirm the presence of genealogy and history but also gesture towards an infinite splitting of the self and the lack of an identifiable identity.
As I began to make my way from one screen to another, I realised that I was never watching one video alone; the sounds and images of the surrounding pieces were not only impossible to ignore but actually embedded themselves in, and became part of, whichever video I was watching.
After Temporal Meditation I found myself beholding the journey of a superbly androgynous figure traversing landscapes from the streets of London to the opulence of Istanbul in the 2003 Place to Passage.
Upholstery becomes clothes to become luggage in the short and mesmerising 2001 Afterwords and a mannequin dressed in a stiff and futuristic dress grows wings to spin like a propeller in Chalayan’s 2000 Aeroplane Dress.
If these earlier pieces are short, succinct and more closely aligned with the artist’s signature fashion designs, then the most recent 2004 Anesthetics is far more allegorical and abstract. What prevails in this work is the essence of the laboratory and the experiment relentlessly surveying rituals and patterns of behavior. The mutability and metamorphoses afforded by a changing of clothes is also ubiquitous in Anesthetics, but here every new costume was cut-out and always accompanied by the outline it left behind in the fabric from which it was lifted.
In pursuit of new forms of presentation to impart a stronger sense of increasingly fragmented identities and an unstable reality, Chalayan arrived at the medium of video and crafted five provocative, though perhaps still underdeveloped, pieces of art.
A native of north Nicosia, Chalayan is internationally renowned for his radical fashion designs. He graduated from Central St. Martin’s College in London and his first collection presented dresses that had been buried, allowed to decay and then exhumed. This collection was promptly snatched up by Browns, London’s famous fashion emporium, and quickly established Chalayan as a force in the world of fashion design. Subsequently, he has been named ‘British Designer of the Year’ twice and his works have been included in major exhibitions at the Tate Modern, the Istanbul Biennial, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and others.
And while fabric may still be the medium he controls most masterfully, Chalayan is an artist whose talents transcend genres and who has already begun to articulate his own distinctive dialect in the medium of the video.
l Hussein Chalayan, An exhibition of video art. Until December 23. Archimede Staffolini Gallery, 1st flr, 52 Makarios Avenue, Lefkosia. Open Tues to Fri 11am to 1pm and 4pm to 8pm, Sat 11am to 1pm. Tel: 22 374429
