Naomi Braithwaite, Nottingham Trent University

The first retrospective exhibition of the fashion designer Ashish Gupta has opened at London’s William Morris Gallery.

As an expert in fashion marketing (and a proud owner of a number of Ashish’s renowned shimmering sequined skirts) I was greatly excited by the prospect of the show.

When the day of my visit came, not only was I was able to immerse myself in Ashish’s wonderful creations, but I had a chance encounter with the designer himself. He told me that the skirt I had chosen to wear that day (a sparkling green fish print fabric, covered in iridescent sequins) was from one of his earliest collections.

It was in 2021, 20 years after Gupta founded his label eponymous label, Ashish, that the Morris Gallery’s curators Roisin Ingleby and Joe Scotland conceived the exhibition. Ingleby told me of the hours of joy they had spent in Ashish’s London design archive, selecting the 60 designs that would eventually be showcased through the exhibition.

As a designer, Gupta is celebrated for colourful, glamourous, extravagant designs realised through detailed craftsmanship. Up to 30 garments are handmade each season. They are made to order, with a limited run on designs, ensuring exclusivity and longevity.

From a Delhi boy to the king of sequins

Ashish Gupta was born in Delhi to GP parents. His first exposure to fashion was through a copy of Vogue magazine that his mother had “smuggled into the house”.

At his strict Catholic school, Gupta was bullied and fashion and cinema became his escapism.

Having initially studied fine art in India, he moved to London to study fashion design at Central Saint Martins, graduating in 2000. He remembers the then course director, Louise Wilson, giving him the best possible advice: to dream.

The colour, sparkle and sequins which have come to define his work ever since are the realisation of that dream.

When Gupta’s eponymous label was discovered by the famous Browns Focus boutique on London’s South Molton Street, he was launched from making clothes for friends into the international fashion industry.

Gupta is now considered a pioneer in the way his designs challenge heterosexual, masculine stereotypes and explore the role of clothing in making political and social statements.

This exhibition focuses on the stories told by his creations, demonstrating fashion’s power as a form of cultural commentary.

Ashish’s Wax Print Dress on display at the exhibition.
Author provided, CC BY

One of the earlier pieces on display is a Dutch Wax Print Dress (2005), a celebration of London’s multicultural heritage. The dress is made from African wax print fabric – a material with a complex colonial history – and embellished with sequins.

In the same room is Ashish’s Immigrant T-shirt combined with a more traditional South Asian embroidered red skirt and veil from his 2017 spring/summer collection.

This collection was the first to explicitly reference his experience as an emigrant by combining elements of western dress and eastern influences.

Designed during the time of Brexit and the British Home Office’s hostile environment policy, this collection explored the emotional impact of leaving home and beginning life elsewhere. Throughout the exhibition are designs that pay testament to Gupta’s belief in equality and inclusive representation.

Crafting cultural commentaries

The cultural and political narratives that define Ashish’s creative storytelling are on show through the combinations of craft skill, materials, sequins and hand embroidery, throughout the exhibition.

Sequins have become Ashish’s signature style and far from cheap embellishments, they represent a technical art form, enabling a different way of working with fabric.

Ashish’s garments are hand made in India using traditional artisinal craft skills.

Many of the garments on display highlight Ashish’s play on traditional craft through the embellishment of sequins, including crochet and Fair Isle knitwear.

On display in the centre of the opening room is the designer’s adaptation of a high vis jacket, with a lumberjack shirt and jeans from the 2010 autumn/winter collection. Here, the addition of sequins play with heterosexual norms.

The second section of the exhibition centres on the Yellow Brick Road collection from autumn/winter 2017, which was inspired by the 1939 film, The Wizard of Oz.

These pieces feature multiple versions of the Rainbow pride flag, to form a collection that celebrates people of colour and queer communities.

The final section of the exhibition showcases the skill of hand embroidery on display in Ashish designs.

A highlight for me was the dressing gown created using Zardozi – a south Asian embroidery technique using gold thread.

This fascinating exhibition presents the wonder of Ashish’s creativity and highlights the power of garments to convey stories and meanings. The glittering genius of combining sequins with traditional craftmanship has Gupta firmly on fashion’s catwalk of fame.

Ashish: Fall in Love and Be More Tender is a free exhibition, on now at the William Morris Gallery, London, until 10 September.

Naomi Braithwaite, Associate Professor in Fashion Marketing and Branding, Nottingham Trent University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Owusu Addo Residence by John Owusu Addo.
Kuukuwa Manful, CC BY-NC-ND

Kuukuwa Manful, SOAS, University of London

As curator of the 2023 Venice architecture biennale, the Ghanaian-Scottish architect, Lesley Lokko, has chosen to highlight the African continent as “the laboratory of the future”.

But as well as looking at the future of architecture on the continent, visitors will also be able to explore its history, through an exhibition at the Arsenale, entitled Tropical Modernism: Architecture and Power in West Africa.

Early 20th-century modernism in Europe saw architects using large expanses of unshaded glass and flat roofs. Practitioners in warmer, humid climates, such as in Africa and Asia, meanwhile, had to adapt their designs to withstand heavier rainfall and warmer temperatures. In late colonial Africa and during the independence era, this style became known as “tropical modernism” or “tropical architecture”.

In the African context, this is possibly the best researched and well-documented architectural movement. When people discuss it further afield, however, it is mostly through a white lens. The focus is on what European architects practising in these regions were doing – African architects of the same era are largely overlooked.

Museum of Science Technology in Accra, designed by Daniel Sydney Kpodo-Tay.
Mun85/Wikimedia, CC BY-NC-ND

Putting Europe at the centre of African stories is a choice that echoes the very colonial histories it seeks to elucidate, where European architects operated as though the continent were a blank slate, devoid of pre-existing architecture worthy of note.

My research shows how architects in Ghana in particular aligned with, adapted, or rejected Western colonial ideas. They created modernist buildings that reflected their visions for their nation, their experiences and their global outlook.

Ghanaian expertise

John Owusu Addo, the first black head of department of Ghana’s first architecture school, and Samuel Opare Larbi, another prominent educator and architect, embodied what I term the dominant Ghanaian tropical modernism. Their practice was most similar to, and aligned with, the practice of the white British tropical modernists.

The former Department of Tropical Architecture was established at the Architectural Association (AA) in London in 1954 by the British wife and husband duo Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry, and James Cubbitt. Although Fry described the city of Kano, in present day Nigeria, as a “complete realisation of urban harmony”, he and Drew nonetheless declared having “invented” architecture in West Africa. Their work was coloured by the imperial, racist and sexist notions of the time.

Owusu Addo and Larbi both trained at the AA. They counted among their contemporaries the German architect Otto Koenisberger and the Australian-born British architect Kenneth Mackensie Scott. Although they faced racial discrimination in Europe and back home, their UK education put them in a position of relative privilege in Ghana.

From the outside, many of the institutional and corporate buildings they designed, including Cedi House in Accra (a high-rise tower that now houses the Ghana Stock Exchange) featured elements of tropical modernism: solar shading devices, rhythmic facades, breeze blocks, cross ventilation and east-west orientation.

Cedi House in Accra.
Simon Ontoyin/Wikimedia, CC BY-NC-ND

But it is in the interiors of their domestic architecture that their keen understanding of the people for whom they were designing becomes most apparent. When I interviewed Owusu Addo and Larbi in 2015, they recounted how they took Ghanaian societies into account. And they spoke of the pride they felt at being African architects.

For the Unity Hall student accommodation at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Owusu Addo created shaded outdoor space, with courtyards and verandas. As he put it: “Rarely do we stay in our rooms in the daytime. If in the daytime anyone was in the room, then he was sick.”

Unity Hall, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi.
Łukasz Stanek, CC BY-NC-ND

Creative dissent

Other architects sought to establish an aesthetic that was visually distinct from European-driven tropical modernism. They accepted the climatic control and other technological and material aspects of the style. However, in the aesthetics they pursued, they were decidedly expressive.

Anyako-born architect Daniel Sydney Kpodo-Tay’s confidence was grounded in his centuries-long family history of building design and construction. Together with his anti-colonial politics and a desire for recognition, this informed an approach that the Ghana Institute of Architects termed “revolutionary”, upon his death in 2018.

Kpodo-Tay was fascinated by symbolism. His designs rejected ornamentation. Instead, he sought to make the buildings themselves sculptural. His projects that were built were often not as bold as his proposals – a compromise he put down to the limited finances and conservatism of clients in Ghana.

When a competition was held, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, to design the headquarters for the Economic Community of West African States organisation, Kpodo-Tay’s proposal drew on the form of a bowl as symbolic of communality and unity. His design for the complex, which was to house offices, a bank and a conference venue, featured bold inverted conical forms with internal spaces arrayed radially.

Owusu Addo, Kpodo-Tay, and Larbi are not the only Ghanaian architects of their generations whose practice was informed by tropical modernism. Many stories are yet to be brought to light, especially those of the women.

Only a few women were trained at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science’s architecture school. Sexism in the industry saw some leave. But others, including the late Alero Olympio who designed Accra’s Kokrobitey Institute, struck out in bold new ways. These visionaries challenged the Euro-centric assumptions of what tropical modernism was, in particular through their use of materials.

As scholars, practitioners and visitors from around the world turn to architecture on the African continent, they must be careful not to treat it as a blank slate in the way previous generations did. Africans have been creating, studying, teaching, and documenting architecture in Africa since time immemorial. Their work matters.

Kuukuwa Manful, Postdoctoral Researcher in Politics of Architecture, SOAS, University of London

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Between the ongoing humanitarian crisis from the February earthquakes and the divisive political climate amidst the presidential and parliamentary elections, the voices and needs of the Turkish people must be heard, perhaps more urgently than at any time in recent history.

In such moments, Turkish artist, activist and philanthropist Vuslat Dogan Sabancı believes that art has a particularly crucial societal role to play. While exploring a range of themes and mediums, her entire body of work is bound together by what she has described as an underlying “passion to start a movement that creates a listening climate” for the cultivation of empathy, healing, and ultimately, social change.

Artistic origins rooted in broader activism

A self-taught artist, Vuslat spent the first two decades of her practice working privately in her Istanbul studio alongside her successful career as a media executive. Despite long focusing on a different world, artistic creation became an increasingly crucial part of her life.

While in a very different domain, Vuslat’s years as CEO and Chairwoman of Hürriyet—Türkiye’s largest independent newspaper—as well as a political activist provided her with insights that have greatly informed her art. From spearheading Hürriyet’s editorial shift towards gender equality and human rights issues to launching trailblazing lobbying campaigns for women’s empowerment, Vuslat’s social engagement has instilled in her the importance of generous listening, a concept and practice involving “hearing beyond words” using “your heart’s ear.”

In fighting to give women a stronger voice and equal treatment in Turkish society, Vuslat met women from all walks of life, from whom she learned how to listen generously in a genuine, empathetic way. Since these transformative experiences, generous listening has been the golden thread of Vuslat’s contributions to public life.

But it was a quiet, reflective period during the COVID-19 pandemic spent in her private studio that inspired her to take her art public and use it as a vehicle for her deeply personal philosophy of social change and healing.

Stepping into the light

Generous listening continues to inform Vuslat’s life in her new full-time career as an artist, with her works boldly inviting others to engage in this practice. Given that generous listening requires transcending the physical act of listening, she believes art is uniquely adapted to this pursuit by “inspiring people and inviting them to think beyond words” with an open heart.

A Place We Meet
I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII
2023
Silver coated mullein plants and
Bayburt stones
Variable dimensions

In the past year, Vuslat has stepped out of her studio and into the light of the global art stage with a fully formed aesthetic voice, carefully honed over many years. Her debut solo exhibition, Silence, curated by Chus Martinez at Pi Artworks in London during May and June of 2022, embodied Vuslat’s vision of creating a transformative experience for the viewer and challenging our perceptions of and interactions with art. The exhibition gathered a captivating, complementary collection of works ranging from intricately crafted sculptures to drawings and installations, each a testament to the significant role of silence in our connections with ourselves, others and the natural world. 

Recognising that language often inhibits a deep connection with nature, Vuslat devoted Silence to countering this tendency by offering a space for visceral, authentic reflection on our surroundings. Using organic curves and forms, the sculptures of Silence evoke natural landscapes, reminding us of our delicate, fragile balance with the environment.

Bold leap forward into the past

Building on this initial public foray, Vuslat is currently preparing her second solo exhibition, Emanet, launching in June at the Baksı Museum in Türkiye, marking the first display of her work in an institutional setting.

Baksi Museum.

The Turkish notion of “emanet” has served as an anchor for this artistic exploration of personal identity and collective historical narratives. Roughly translating as something which is passed on and entrusted to future generations for protection and safekeeping, this ancient concept permeates every aspect of the exhibition, starting with its location.

Vuslat’s choice of Baksı Museum in northeastern Türkiye for Emanet is highly symbolic, as both share a devotion to the preservation of cultural traditions, shared experiences and geographies, as well as the use of forgotten wisdom to address today’s problems. Accordingly, the works of Emanet reflect the natural elements, cultural identity and history of Baksı’s landscape on the Anatolian steppe.

The landscape around Baksi Museum.

The region’s mullein plants, and their healing properties, served as models for Emanet’s sculptures—displayed on plinths made of local stones—while the flow of the surrounding river inspired its suspended spiraling centerpiece, ‘the Umbilical Cord of Life,’ a meditation on the cycle of life and death.

Umbilical Cord Of Life
2023
3D Print on PLA
450 x 400 x 600 cm

Capturing Emanet’s essence, return curator Chus Martinez has noted Vuslat’s devotion to “creating an environment through art where we can listen to ourselves and reflect on what our ancestors have passed onto us and what we can add to this heritage to produce a better future.”

Harnessing art to spread generous listening

In 2020, Vuslat established the Vuslat Foundation on this very concept. Recognising generous listening’s potential as a “preventive medicine,” she created this global philanthropic organisation, to, in her words, facilitate “a climate of listening in education, civic society, business and government” in order to resolve conflicts “before they turn into crisis.”

Since its inception, art has been a key vessel for the Vuslat Foundation’s endeavours. Indeed, its public launch came at the 2021 Venice Biennale of Architecture, where in response to the theme ‘How will we live together?’ it presented a new installation, ‘The Listener,’ by Italian artist Giuseppe Penone to symbolise art’s capacity to elicit deep reflection, build shared listening spaces and spark meaningful conversations for change.

Alongside her own art career, Vuslat has said that the Vuslat Foundation “will continue to do these kinds of projects,” in order to spread the benefits of generous listening as widely as possible.

Over the coming year, the societal backdrop formed by post-earthquake national trauma, the upcoming Turkish elections and the centennial of the Turkish Republic’s founding by Atatürk will add additional weight and responsibility to these upcoming artistic undertakings.

As such, Vuslat remains as committed as ever to channeling art, whether hers or the work of other inspiring artists, to facilitate generous listening’s role in lighting a path of healing, understanding and redemption.

Amulet
2023
Ceramic and silver
coated leafs
Variable dimensions

Image credits: Kayhan Kaygusuz.