 GRADUATION DRESSES - Series of photographs |
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| To view a selection of photographs from the Graduation dresses series please click on the image or the title links below: Biljana (Penelope Cruz, Oscar de la Renta dress) 2005 Nevena (John Galiano dress) 2005 Vesna (Kylie dress) 2005 Ana (Jennifer Lopez dress) 2006 Natasa (Catherine Zeta-Jones dress) 2006 Ivana (Megi Gilenhal, Prada dress / Christos Costarellos dress) 2006 Sara (Versace dress) 2006 | |||||
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"Clothing is not seen as simply reflecting given aspects of the self but, through its particular material propensities, is co-constutive of facets such as identity, sexuality and social role." ‘Graduation Dresses’ is an ongoing project consisting of a series of photographs taken by Kern of young women, who have recently graduated from secondary schools in Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Their dresses, made by the artist’s mother who runs a sewing business from her home, are based on images found on the Internet, fashion magazines and on television, of celebrities and models wearing haute couture dresses. Kern photographs them in their homes and through this engagement with their personal spaces captures a significant moment in that transitional journey from adolescence to womanhood, revealing both their incipient maturity as well as their vulnerability. Reflective of the transitional nature of adolescence, graduation dresses are also symbolic of the times they are situated in: post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina, a country undergoing its own transition from socialist to capitalist market economy and values. Being the same age when I left Bosnia as the graduate girls I photograph, I am drawn to document that point in their lives. The move to Britain for me happened quite abruptly with a backdrop of the civil war hence my generation is the only one not to have had the graduation ball. Perhaps it is this 'loss' that makes me curious as to how these young women's identities are shaped, and what are their hopes and fears in the face of the future, which seems so unstable in the current political and economic climate. All of the graduate girls I have photographed were born in the late eighties and were children when the civil war started in what was Yugoslavia. That meant that they grew up during the war and their adolescent years have been shaped by the equally transitional and unstable post-war period.
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"Not to be missed is a series of large-scale portraits taken by London-based Margareta Kern. Reminiscent of the environmental portraits by the Mexican photographer Daniela Rossell, Kern's work captures a series of young Bosnian women projecting themselves headlong into maturity." St Louis Art Capsule, River Front Times, 2008 "The exhibition “Clothes for Living & Dying” is a work of a young woman, from Banja Luka, who in 1992, without having her own graduation, fleeing the war, immigrated to the United Kingdom. She stayed there, finished her education and formed views on the world, and her own identity. "One artist looking ahead is Margareta Kern, who has produced a series of photographs of girls graduating from high school. They all wear copies of fashion worn by celebrities, made by her mother, a seamstress in Banja Luka, a town devastated during the war.The pictures encapsulate the exhibition title. The girls are "from here" — Banja Luka. The fashion is "from there" — not the place of the ominous "other," but the world of style and sophistication. Equally important is that a milestone in personal life is being passed. Young girls are turning into women. It happens everywhere — it happens to boys, too — and its acknowledgment is a sign that life goes on, even in lands where genocide occurred not so long ago." David Bonetti, St Louis Today, Feb 2008 |
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Photographs available in a limited edition of 5 C-type prints plus 2 AP. Each print is accompanied by A4 C-type print of the scann of the artist's mother's book, showing an image on which the dress is based. The Graduation Dresses series will be exhibited at the forthcoming
exhibition Clothes for Living & Dying, at the Margaret Harvey Gallery, from 12.9. - 18.10.2008. Clothes for Living & Dying is a touring exhibition by the University of Hertfordshire Galleries. A fully illustrated catalogue with essays by Pennina Barnett, Dr Alex Rotas, Matthew Shaul and Margareta Kern will be available at respective touring venues. Size: 21 x 26 cm, 48 pages, colour. Edition of 1000, £7.95. To
read an excerpt from an interview by Rohini Malik Okon and Margareta Kern please click here.
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