State of Fashion 2024: Ties that Bind
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Curated by Rachel Dedman and Louise Bennetts, State of Fashion 2024 | Ties that Bind showcased together creative practices in fashion, textiles and contemporary art from across the Global South. This edition of the Biennale explored the complexities of tradition, the political power of clothing, and alternative approaches to exploitative fashion systems.
Ties that Bind had a decentralised structure. The Biennale unfolded across four places: the home site in Arnhem, the Netherlands, and three sister sites in Nairobi, Kenya, Bengalūru, India, and São Paulo, Brazil. In each sister site, an interlocutor-curator – Sunny Dolat, Kallol Datta and Hanayrá Negreiros – was invited to develop a project that responds to the Biennale’s themes from their perspective, embedded in their local context and community.
Ties that Bind celebrated fashion in an expanded field, through critical creative practices from all over the world. How are artists from the Global South addressing and contesting colonial legacies embedded in clothing and cloth? How are designers evolving inherited traditions, and engaging with the urgencies of our time? Rooted in the universal intimacy of fabric, Ties that Bind seeks to amplify the kinships and connectedness among global practices, and share the powerful human stories woven into what we wear.
Home site
In the State of Fashion home site of Arnhem, Ties that Bind brings together creative practices in fashion, textiles and contemporary art from across the Global South. Based in Rembrandt Theatre, with key installations in Museum Arnhem and Rozet, the exhibition celebrates fashion in an expanded field: from extraordinary clothing to the critical, conceptual work of contemporary artists.
Unfolding across four core themes, Ties that Bind unravels notions of tradition, explores the political power of clothing, and alternative approaches to exploitative fashion systems. How are artists from the Global South addressing and contesting colonial legacies embedded in clothing and cloth? How are designers evolving inherited traditions, and engaging with the urgencies of our time?
Rooted in the universal intimacy of fabric, Ties that Bind seeks to amplify the kinships and connectedness among global practices, and share the powerful human stories woven into what we wear.
Photo: Maison ARTC, REBUILD, commissioned for State of Fashion 2024
Want to read back on everything about the Ties that Bind exhibition and the State of Fashion Biennale?
Find out in our Visitor’s Guide.
Theme: Political Bodies
By virtue of being made by hand and worn on the body, textiles and dress are intimately connected to people, society and the political. For hundreds of years, the textile trade was entwined with colonial systems of exploitation, but clothing has always remained a mode of resistance, as well as an instrument of repression.
Theme: Designing Integrity
Today’s global fashion system is heavily exploitative of the world’s human and environmental resources, and it is predominantly the Global South that bears the burden of demand for fast, cheap clothing. From the practice of waste colonialism – where developed countries dump their textile and clothing waste in developing countries – to the inhuman treatment of garment workers, the dominant economic model is unethical and unsustainable.
Theme: Dismantling Tradition
Tradition is a deceptively complex term. Fashion and the making of clothing are practices defined by constant change and transformation. Although we associate tradition with the past, it is never at odds with the innovative. In Dismantling Tradition, fashion designers from across the Global South revel in the historical techniques they inherit,
Theme: The Fabric of Shelter
Cloth is a building block of humans’ social and material lives; from birth we are swaddled, in death we are shrouded. The very word fashion means to make, to form. The technology of textiles is fundamental and ancient, and clothes are the changeable, ephemeral homes through which we navigate the world.