PUBLIC TALK: SymbioticA Friday Seminar> 'Fashion is not for sissies!'

SymbioticA Friday Seminar; Title: 'Fashion is not for sissies!'; Speaker: Kirsten Hudson; Time & Location: 3:30 - 5pm @ SymbioticA;

This week’s Friday Seminar will be presented by SymbioticA resident Kirsten Hudson, who will discuss her project titled “mini flesh works” on which she is collaborating with Guy Ben-Ary.

Mini flesh works is a project that uses biotechnology in inefficient and culturally unauthorised ways, consciously turning biotechnology away from its aims. Subverting biotechnological intent by using fashion as a strategy that connotes frivolity, uselessness and perversion, mini flesh works critiques ‘the authority of biotechnology and biomedicine by highlighting the contingencies and limitations in biotech’s self-fulfilling narrative of future medicine’ (Victoria Pitts, 2003). Positioning fashion as a strategy, similarly to how Rosie Braidotti locates contemporary science fiction as a ‘vehicle for the reflection on our own limits, on the cultural, ideological and technical closures or our times’ (Rosie Braidotti, 2002), mini flesh works deliberately situates the body as an aesthetic threshold, a field of intensities available to a multiplicity of ‘fashionable’ metamorphoses. Redeploying notions of fashion and ornamentation to tissue cultured lengths of human skin, mini flesh works articulates a politics that intentionally disrupts normative readings of the skin such that societal understandings of the self and ‘Other’ are threatened.

Kirsten Hudson is a woman of many indolent past-times. Although she manages a posse of four kids, a dog, two cats and a husband, and holds a PhD in fine art and contemporary baroque feminist theory from Curtin University, she maintains that she is essentially lazy, narcissistic and self-indulgent. Since moving on from a successful fashion management company she co-founded with Gillian O'Meagher in 2005, Kirsten can now be found as a sessional lecturer at Curtin University, speaking her mind on textiles, fashion, historical and contemporary theories of beauty as well as fantasy and cultural representation.

More Info: http://www.symbiotica.uwa.edu.au/activities/friday_afternoons