Clothes, Cloth & Culture Group Dr Wessie Ling, Dr Bharti Parmar

This group is a monthly forum for creative practitioners and thinkers across the spectrum of artists, designers, curators, writers and activists working with cloth. Setting cloth into the wider contexts of material and visual culture, the Clothes, Cloth & Culture Group provides a space for conversations about the politics of cloth from a distinctively cross-cultural viewpoint.

Audio recordings of the talks are available at the bottom of the page

Convened by Dr. Christine Checinska, Iniva’s second Stuart Hall Library Animateur.

Cloth & the Archive

May’s event speakers:

Dr. Wessie Ling: The Multiplicity of the Chinese Dress

Wessie Ling is an artist, cultural historian and Reader in Fashion Practice. Her practice examines the cultural property of fashion. The presentation traces the emergence of the Chinese dress, which coincided with the political and social movements of 1920s Republican China. Amidst its denial by Communist China and its ignominious adaptation, media culture, fashion production, and global consumption ensure its continued evolution.

Dr. Bharti Parmar: From Bombay to ‘bombassa’; Victorian women in black

Bharti Parmar is an artist and academic. Her work is about the intersections between art and craft and is informed by the poetics of museological objects. She is a frequent speaker on her practice as an artist in relation to understandings of archival material culture from postcolonial perspectives. She will be speaking about how her artwork Widows Weeds expands notions of acculturation, geography and the lineage of C19th mourning cloth.