Illustration by Slavs and Tatars
How does fashion operate as a form of anti-colonial resistance?
What is the relationship between imperial collapse and material culture, specifically textiles and clothing? The research team on this project will explore this question by focusing on two diverse post-imperial spaces: the Soviet Union and the Middle East.
Through the long twentieth-century a series of imperial, social, and ecological collapses and reformations have registered in the fabrics and fashions we use to form and transform our bodies and social environments. Textiles and wearable costumes have at once structured imperial formations and their ordering of ecological, racial, and gendered regimes. However, they have also materialized alternate ways of being, refashioning conceptions of identity, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality as they transform the shape of the body and our interaction with lived space and environment. Comparing the Soviet and French Orientalist imaginaries of its southern and eastern colonies in North Africa, the Caucasus, and Central Asia exposes a common preoccupation with costume and textiles as both modes of exoticization and imperial capture and revolutionary forms of anti-colonial resistance. This includes the ways in which French orientalist photographs of women in North Africa exoticized dress, bodily ornamentation, and textiles to mediate colonial desires, as well as how costume and textile served the Soviet orientalist creation of distinctive "nationalities" and their assimilation into the multinational imperial project. The collapse of these two empires renders legible how self-fashioning through forms of wearable art and textiles—as indigenous semiotics shared by both regions and interconnected through overlapping migratory histories of textile production and circulation—provided a means of evasion, disguise, and play. This project turns to costumes, textiles, and wearable art as forms of anti-colonial and queer resistance at the interfaces of embodiment, materiality, ecology, and affect. Activities include a series of reading groups, lectures, performances, and exhibitions that will travel from Chicago (2024) to Tbilisi (2025) and Paris (2026). Reinterpreting traditional clothes, parodying uniforms, or queering garments against a backdrop of imperial, social, and ecological collapse, the project addresses the formation of new modes of politics and aesthetics fashioned through wearable art.
Associate Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and in the College
University of Chicago
Leah Feldman’s research focuses on empire, nationalism, and critical approaches to ethnicity, gender and sexuality from the vantage point of the Caucasus and Central Asia. Her first book, On the Threshold of Eurasia: Orientalism and Revolutionary Aesthetics in the Caucasus (Cornell...
Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and in the College
University of Chicago
Hoda El Shakry's research centers on twentieth- and twenty-first-century cultural production from North Africa and the Middle East, with an emphasis on the relationship between aesthetics and ethics. She specializes in Arabophone and Francophone literature, visual culture, and criticism of the...
Independent Artist and Scholar
Slavs and Tatars
Payam Sharifi is a member of Slavs and Tatars, an internationally renowned art collective devoted to an area East of the former Berlin Wall and West of the Great Wall of China known as Eurasia. Since its inception in 2006, the collective has shown a...
PhD Candidate in Black Studies
Northwestern University
Rikki Byrd is a writer, educator and curator who works across the academy, arts and fashion industries. Her dissertation, “In Loving Memory: Black Performance and the Sartorial Politics of Mourning,” explores the ways Black people across the diaspora perform mourning through clothing...
Carousel with 3 slides shown at a time. Use the Previous and Next buttons to navigate, or the slide dot buttons at the end to jump to slides.
The Chicago-based artist joined the dance collective CHAOS for performance and discussion.
At this event Yemeni-Bosnian multimedia artist Alia Ali discussed her practice as an expression of Yemeni futurity.
This event featured a film screening and artist talk with Gluklya.
This lecture by Gyula Muskovics focused on the work of Hungarian underground artist Tamás Király.
The second meeting of the Costumes and Collapse Reading Group focused on performativity, race, and gender.
The first meeting of the Costumes and Collapse Reading Group focused on the histories and theories of wearable art, textiles, and costuming.
Artist talk with Belarusian artist Rufina Bazlova who uses traditional Belarusian embroidery to depict socio-political issues.
Carousel with 3 slides shown at a time. Use the Previous and Next buttons to navigate, or the slide dot buttons at the end to jump to slides.
The Chicago-based artist joined the dance collective CHAOS for performance and discussion.
Carousel with 3 slides shown at a time. Use the Previous and Next buttons to navigate, or the slide dot buttons at the end to jump to slides.
At this event Yemeni-Bosnian multimedia artist Alia Ali discussed her practice as an expression of Yemeni futurity.
This lecture by Gyula Muskovics focused on the work of Hungarian underground artist Tamás Király.
Artist talk with Belarusian artist Rufina Bazlova who uses traditional Belarusian embroidery to depict socio-political issues.
Carousel with 3 slides shown at a time. Use the Previous and Next buttons to navigate, or the slide dot buttons at the end to jump to slides.
This event featured a film screening and artist talk with Gluklya.
Carousel with 3 slides shown at a time. Use the Previous and Next buttons to navigate, or the slide dot buttons at the end to jump to slides.
The second meeting of the Costumes and Collapse Reading Group focused on performativity, race, and gender.
The first meeting of the Costumes and Collapse Reading Group focused on the histories and theories of wearable art, textiles, and costuming.
