Clothes for Living and Dying/Odjeca za Zivot i Smrt
International touring solo exhibition
3 - 31 September 2009 - Galerija Umjetnina Slavonski Brod, Croatia
11 October - 8 November 2009 - Kunstverein Worms, Germany

Graduation Dresses is an ongoing project consisting of a series of photographs Kern takes of young women, who have recently graduated from secondary schools in Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Their dresses made by the artist's mother, are based on images found on the Internet and in fashion magazines, of celebrities wearing haute couture dresses.

Clothes for Death is an ongoing research based project documenting women in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina who prepare clothes in which they wish to be buried. Deeply moved upon hearing about this relatively unknown and personal custom, Kern set out on a complex journey, meeting and documenting the women who have agreed to open their door and share their utmost personal possessions, the clothes in which they have chosen to be buried in.

"Margareta Kern, by being in her mother's tailoring salon, and photographing in the Banjaluka homes, has done a very important self-reflective act. The imitation of life, which she captured through the graduation dresses, is in fact, in the broadest possible way, an imitation of an identity. One cannot get rid of an identity, no matter how much one wanted, no matter how much one didn't need it anymore and no matter how much it seemed like an imitation. In one of the photographs, taken in Orubica, in Croatia, a woman is sitting on her bed, in front of a cheap wall tapestry of the 'Last Supper'. She is barefoot, her hands in her lap. Her head is in the place where in the tapestry picture sits Jesus Christ. We may have not even noticed that, were it not for the expression on her face, which is neither sad nor contemplative. She is neither posing, nor completely relaxed. She looks like someone who is waiting. That female Jesus in the photograph of Margareta Kern is one of the possible answers to the question why take photographs."
Miljenko Jergovic, for Jutarnji List (The Morning Post, Zagreb, May 2008). Full article in Croatian/English.

Clothes for Living & Dying is UH Galleries touring exhibition in collaboration with respective venues.

A fully illustrated catalogue with essays by Pennina Barnett, Dr Alex Rotas, Matthew Shaul and Margareta Kern, is available at respective touring venues or by contacting Amisha Karia, UH Galleries Support Officer T: 01707 284290.

The following is an excerpt from the catalogue essay by Pennina Barnett titled A Respectful Distance: The Negotiation of Space in Margareta Kern's Clothes for Death

"Susan Sontag describes photography as 'an elegiac art... touched with pathos.' Kern's photographs have a melancholic air about them, so to ask how absence is inscribed within Clothes for Death may seem absurd. It's there of course in the display of carefully selected clothes worn only in death; the Christian iconography that adorns so many rooms; the unstinting gaze that pierces each image. But it also lurks in the very organisation of pictorial space: the sparse whitewashed walls that corner the diminutive figure of Rosa; the materiality of their uneven surfaces and small soft shadow cast upon them; the open wooden chest emptied of burial clothes; and similar effects across the series - an empty cardboard box; the 'vacant' bed that Liza faces, as if at a wake; stretches of windowless walls, the occasional window, blinded with light, like a blank canvas. Yet death is constantly interrupted by the detail of life, in all its ordinariness: a blue mug, a bedside light, a carton of juice. Death and life in uncanny relation."

The essay in full can be downloaded here.

The exhibition reviews:
The element of ambiguity Kern feels on her return is evident in these photographs. There is a sense of transience experienced on both sides of the lens, a mutual searching for identity....The most telling of the photographs, however, are the 'Clothes for Death'. Likened in the catalogue to memento mori or vanitas, these are poignant and affecting images in which eight elderly women are portrayed alongside the skirts, blouses and headscarves they will only wear when dead. A record of the most intimate of wardrobes, a form of trousseau for death, these photographs are as much about life as its ending; content, vulnerable, resolute, uncertain, proud and layered with texture.
June Hill, for embroidery, July-August 2009

People who have witnessed traumatic social and political upheaval gaze with what seems like fearless resignation, not just at Kern's lens, but towards the event for which they have prepared their outfit.
Tina Jackson for Metro, Bradford, review: 4 stars, June 2009

A young woman stands in her inexpensive copy of the draped gold dress Keira Knightley wore to the British premiere of Pirates of the Caribbean II. It should be a shoddy image of consumer capitalism but actually it's heart-breaking. ... Kern is more interested in the politics of fashion than clothing per se. But there is a lingering pleasure to the 'textileness' of the pictures. ... There is a quiet heroism to these older citizens anticipating the end of life - a voyage to the unknown. ... Photography can be intrusive, but there is respectfulness to the images, a sense of care.
Liz Hoggard, for Selvedge, Issue 27, Mar/April 2009

Past venues:
8 April - 14 June 2009
Impressions Gallery/Bradford/UK

12 September - 18 October 2008
Margaret Harvey Gallery/St Albans/UK

15 May - 29 May 2008
HDLU: PM & Bacva Galerija/Zagreb/Croatia
For images from the exhibition in Zagreb please click here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/margaretakern/

The exhibition has been kindly supported by: Gradski ured za obrazovanje, kulturu i sport grada Zagreba / Department of Education, Culture and Sport - City of Zagreb, Department for the Culture - City of Slavonski Brod, Ministarstvo kulture Republike Hrvatske/ Ministry of Culture of Republic of Croatia, The British Council, Arts Council England, The University of Hertfordshire Galleries and Hrvatsko Drustvo Likovnih Umjetnika Zagreb/Croatian Association of Artists, Zagreb.

Gordana with her working colleagues at the AEG Telefunken factory, Berlin, 1969

From Gordana's personal photo album, 2009

CITIES & METHODOLOGIES
SLADE SCHOOL OF ART RESEARCH CENTRE
London, 28 – 29th MAY 2009

ETO TAKO JE TO BILO/AND THAT’S HOW IT WAS 
When stories become histories and histories stories
(on being a guest worker/artist)
 
I was recently an artist in residence in Berlin, where I researched an organised mass labour migration from the socialist Yugoslavia to the West Germany, which took place in the late 1960s. The labour migrants were called ‘Gastarbeiter’ or ‘guest workers’, alluding to their temporary stay. Many of these temporary workers never returned home. I interviewed the women who still live in Berlin, and who came in 1968 to work for West Berlin’s large electrical and telecommunication companies. 
I will reflect on the research process of gathering information and documentation through the interviews, individual photo albums, public archives, as well as historical, critical and literary texts and through this process look at the constructions of narratives and the role of artist in re-creating and re-covering (hi)stories and memories.

http://guestworkerberlin.blogspot.com

Berlin residency was part of the program curated by Peter Cross for the group exhibition "Journeys of No Return", scheduled to take place in Berlin in 2010. The residency was funded by the British Council.

Margareta Kern has been selected as one of the recipients of the National Media Photography Bursary 2008/09 to assist her with the continuation and completion of the Clothes for Death project.
www.nationalmediamuseum.org.uk

Clothes for Death/Odjeca za Smrt is a research based visual art project documenting women in Croatia and Bosnia & Herzegovina who prepare clothes in which they wish to be buried.

SECOND SKINS: Cloth and Difference
30th April 2009
Iniva Symposium @ Rivington Place, London
 
Second Skins aims to open up a dialogue on 'cloth and difference' via a series of cross-cultural and interdisciplinary exchanges. Issues of identity and cultural heritage are readily expressed through cloth and its tactile quality induces personal and collective associations. Cloth ‘speaks'. By drawing together creative thinkers across visual art, design, cultural studies, anthropology and sociology, Second Skins explores the production, consumption and language of cloth.

Speakers include cultural critics and curators: Yasmin Canvin, Jessica Hemmings, John Hutnyk, Sarat Maharaj, Sarah Quinton, Barbara Taylor, and artists: Sokar Douglas Camp CBE, Raimi Gbadamosi, Hans Hamid Rasmussen, Margareta Kern, Grace Ndiritu, and Rosanna Raymond with a specially commissioned performance. 

For further information and to book a place please see http://www.iniva.org/events/what_s_on/second_skins

5th Culture Fair
The Student Centre Zagreb, 11-14 December 2008
www.sczg.hr/velesajamkulture

photography: Matea Jocic 2008

Draga EU/ Dear EU - installation by Margareta Kern
As it is looking a bit uncertain whether Santa Clause is coming to Croatia, we are inviting you this year to write to the European Union. Say what is on your mind, what do you want from the EU, if you’ve been good, or perhaps you might want to give advice to the EU.
If however, you are not able to write a letter, as afterall letters are so old-fashioned, you can write to the EU by sending an email to dragaeu(dot)deareu(at)googlemail(dot)com

Disclaimer: All letters/emails will be sent to the European Union. We cannot guarantee that the wishes will be fulfilled. For the benefit of the Europeans and the entry of Croatians into Europe, some of the letters will be anonymously posted on the SC website.
“Send me what ever you want EU but send it with love and joy. Posalji mi sto god zelis EU, samo posalji sa ljubavlju i veseljem.” Kiril, 21, Pleven, Bugarska

Sunday 14the December 2008 at 17:00 "Da li Hrvatska ulazi u EU ili EU ulazi u Hrvatsku? Is Croatia entering EU or EU is entering Croatia?"
As part the ‘Conversations with the artists’, Margareta Kern will be together with the participants discussing questions regarding the entry of Croatia into the EU, with a particular emphasis on the relationship between the public and private funding of the arts. What changes in the arts funding would artists like to see? Can and do artists want to influence the politics of funding? Does it matter who pays?

19:00 Personal Expert/Osobni znalac: Kako je u Londonu? How is it in London?
Come to the SC café between 19 – 19:30 and speak to the personal expert on London: Margareta Kern. Small souvenir awaits the curious ones.