No Fashion, Please!: Photography Between Gender and Lifestyle

The title may say “please,” but the 19 artists featured here are anything but polite in their rejection of traditional notions of fashion, gender and beauty. The media strategies employed are manifold, from staged photographic images, projections and performances to body sculptures, video and film. From Jeff Bark’s painterly and perverse “Flesh Rainbow” to Sophia Wallace’s portraits of feminized male models, these daring and reckless experiments veer closer to the ceremonies and rituals of body art than to fashion, and reinvent the red-carpet question: “who are you wearing?” Participating artists include Chan-Hyo Bae, Tracey Baran, Jeff Bark, Leigh Bowery/Fergus Greer, Steven Cohen/Marianne Greber, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Matthias Herrmann, Lea Golda Holterman, Izima Kaoru, Luigi & Luca, Sandra Mann, Martin & The evil eyes of Nur, Brigitte Niedermair, Erwin Olaf, Alex Prager, Hanna Putz, Viviane Sassen, Sophia Wallace and Bruce Weber.