Event #1: Making Strange: Gagawaka + Postmortem by Vivan Sundaram

Women's undergarments become...overgarments

I visited the UCLA Fowler Museum on May 1^st to view Sundaram’s exhibit, “Making Strange.” And strange it was, filled with clothing that may border – in some people’s perspectives – on the fine line between trash and eccentric art. Interestingly enough, Sundaram’s exhibit is composed of twenty-seven individual clothing garments created from recycled materials and medical supplies. Ranging from eerie to interestingly fashionable, these clothes share a basis with the course’s focus on the human body, the subject of Week 4’s lectures.  An image on the wall of the building stated, “Sundaram’s audacious line of haute couture […] points to the inseparability of fashion, or clothing, and the human body.”

Filled with pills and also a body

Sundaram takes his art even further, combining medical supplies, which are inevitably linked to the human body, with his art. The use of materials such as pill wrappers to create clothing reminded me of the Body Worlds exhibition I attended several years ago, in which medical technology is used to accentuate the human body. In Sudaram’s case, the relation between clothing and the human body only serves to emphasize how much time he – as an artist – has put into learning anatomy, a key point in Week 4’s lecture.

Is it hair? Or is it a wig?

Overall, I enjoyed this exhibit, but I was a little – or maybe a lot – shocked by the materials Sundaram used to create his clothing, such as a hair-like substance that was either a wig or a hair. However, I think that this exhibit serves as a good commentary on several points that people are trying to emphasize nowadays: recycling, the relationship between the body and medicine and the inseparability of clothing and the human body. 

A picture of me with the security guard. (I'm the taller one).

Website: 

http://www.fowler.ucla.edu/exhibitions/making-strange-gagawaka-postmortem-vivan-sundaram