Regina Möller, embodiment - dress plot, Photo: Hannes Böck
Regina Möller situates her works in the border realm of art, fashion, and comics. She takes various formats of contemporary cultural communication and reflects on their identity-forming, economic, and functional connotations. For example, in her magazine regina, with which she has reached a broad readership since the late 1990s, she adapts the language of women's magazines. Through subtle shifts she undermines the common constructions of female identity. Parallel to this, Regina Möller has designed clothing, carpets, furniture, and inner decor under her own label, embodiment, since 1993. In doing so, she charges the materials with new meanings and examines the socio-cultural parameters of products beyond current and thereby transitory fashions.
Regina Möller, embodiment - dress plot, Photo: Hannes Böck
For her exhibition embodiment - dress plot at the Secession, Regina Möller designed a new collection, which she stages as an installation, developing a complex tale in the medial crossing of clothing, stage design, and radio show.
Regina Möller, embodiment - dress plot, Photo: Hannes Böck
Thematically, the starting point is the comic figure Poison Ivy. Originally conceived as a peripheral figure to Batman, she has meanwhile emancipated herself through her own comic and become a super hero. Characteristic is her double identity as protector of plants and the environment on the one hand, and a destructive criminal, on the other. Thanks to a hyperactive immune system, her body does not react to the deadly poisons of the plants that she lovingly tends in her green paradise; plants whose killer-vines and poisonous pollen she simultaneously deploys as biological weapons against her enemies.
Regina Möller, embodiment - dress plot, Photo: Hannes Böck
Poison Ivy's inconstancy and the double image of the female as the little housewife and "femme fatale" are mirrored in a variety of ways in Regina Möller's staging. She has developed two fictive female characters, which, in the end, stand for one person. They are defined through their surroundings, their voices, and their clothes. The outfits come alive through the details and are, in principle, wearable. The identity-forming function of costumes in comics is based on imagining them as a second skin. Through a battle enacted with the costume, this type of "personification of the cover"-literally, the embodiment-intensifies in the radio play to a dramatic and amusing event of self-discovery.
Regina Möller, embodiment - dress plot, Photo: Hannes Böck
Regina Möller contradicts designs of ideal femininity by grounding them in a relation to herself as a person. Möller opposes the standardization and normalization of the body, which is allegorically embodied by the dressmaker's dummy as costume bearer, with her own body, from which she takes the measurements for the costume. Her comical-style portrait is printed on the costumes' designs as well as larger-than-life murals.
Regina Möller, embodiment - dress plot, Photo: Hannes Böck
Regina Möller's installations quote the fashion world's means of presentation, for example, showcase windows and catwalks, as well as the language of museums' exhibition displays and the theater stage. Oscillating between these referential spaces, on the borderline of art and fashion, body and costume design, she presents a scenario that plays out individual and model, fiction and reality.
Regina Möller, embodiment - dress plot, Photo: Hannes Böck
PUBLICATION
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REGINA MÖLLER 40 pages, 28 color illustrations authors: Matthias Herrmann, Hedwig Saxenhuber, Barbara Vinken Secession 2004, ISBN 3-901926-76-3 ___________________ available in the shop |
REGINA MÖLLER lives and works in Berlin and Stockholm.
Exhibitions (Selection): 2004 3. berlin biennale für zeitgenössische kunst, Kunst-Werke Berlin; Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin; 4 & 4, Galerie Müller de Chiara, Berlin; 2003 Between the Lines, apexart, New York; 2002 International Art Flag Festival, Seoul; re-direct, Künstlerhaus Stuttgart; 2001 First Story - Women Building / New Narratives for the 21st Century, Galeria do Palácio, Porto; Spiel-Skulptur, Kindergarten, Grossmugl/Lower Austria; 2000 Rénovation, F.R.A.C. Languedoc-Roussillon, Montpellier; Models of Resistance, Overgarden, Copenhagen; All You Can Eat, Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig; Cross Female, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; Mengenbüro, Skuc Galerie, Ljubljana; 1999 embodiment LineOne, F.R.A.C. Champagne-Ardenne, Reims; Kunstpreis der Böttcherstraße in Bremen, Kunsthalle Bremen; Space, Witte de With, Rotterdam; 1997 Meinen Arbeitsplatz gibt es noch nicht, Kunstverein München; Grazer Kunstverein
Regina Möller, embodiment - dress plot, Photo: Hannes Böck
The exhibition is supported by:
IFA. Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen e.V.
plan 2. neubert & fuchs oeg
The exhibitions are realized through support of:
Erste Bank - Partner of the Secession
Bundesministerium für Unterricht, Kunst und Kultur
Wien Kultur
Friends of the Secession
HS Art Service, Kunsttransporteur der Secession
| SILVIA
KOLBOWSKI |
EXHIBITION PROGRAM 2004 |
For further information and photographic material please contact:
Tamara Schwarzmayr
Secession, Association of Visual Artists Vienna Secession
Friedrichstraße 12, 1010 Vienna
Tel: +43-1-5875307-21, Fax: +43-1-5875307-34
presse@secession.at