SS25 - GOSHKA MACUGA

Salt Looks Like Sugar is a multi-layered project developed by Goshka Macuga for Miu Miu SS202s. From the futuristic single-prop newspaper specially edited and designed for the show, titled The Truthless Times, to the overall installation resembling a newspaper printing plant, the artist presents a constellation of elements for deciphering the concept of truth and its representation. Rather than relying on a simple formula, Macuga integrates multiple components into the installation, each guiding the viewer along various paths toward understanding the human experience of reality in today's world where the truth has to be found by individual investigation rather than available in commonly distributed sources. Misconception and aims to communicate are forever entangled. The narrative of the film The Truthless Times follows two characters, Pathos and Logos, who live dual lives as undercover researchers in a newspaper printing plant. Logos, a writer by nature, embodies logic and reason, while Pathos represents emotion. Both work for The Truthless Times, a newspaper funded by the Queer Labour Party (QLP), which was established to promote truth in the media and fight against misinformation. As they navigate the complexities of truth in their work, a personal conflict arises when Logos falls in love with a young philosopher and conceals this from Pathos. The tension between them escalates, leading to an emotional confrontation. The resolution of their conflict is left in the hands of an unseen third presence, Ethos, which exists within the moral consciousness of the audience, subtly guiding their interpretation of events. The history of workers' rights and ideological activism become entangled with personal dilemmas. In the context of the post-truth era, where the boundaries between fact and fiction are increasingly blurred, understanding who controls the narratives related to events becomes even more critical. Issues of truth, misinformation, and manipulation are intricately linked with questions of power, freedom of speech, and representation. The audiences are encouraged to critically reflect on the role of individual investigation and expression in shaping public discourse, and to consider how the freedom to share narratives can be both a tool for empowerment and a site of conflict in the broader struggle over truth and meaning in contemporary society and its future evolution.

FW24 - CECILE B. EVANS

In this special project for Miu Miu, artist Cecile b. Evans offers us a surreal thriller about one of the last human translators and a memory that escapes her.

Reception! Stars acclaimed actress Guslagie Malanda as a woman named reception who specializes in lost languages. In the wake of a storage crisis that has seen the erasure of digital memory from personal devices, reception works in a former parliament hemicycle that has been repurposed as a data center. She receives a transmission of a woman's intimate memory. The woman speaks in Irish Gaelic and reception interprets her experience into French, faithfully dictating to a machine that transcribes it to history in English. In this vigorous process of receiving and transitioning the woman's memory, reception's own memory escapes her and goes rogue in the showspace. In a choreographed screen ballet, the memory moves onto reception's personal storage devices, enforcing the link between what we hold in our bodies and what is kept in the objects we carry with us.

A question prevails: Which memories exist beyond us and how do they survive?

This special project for Miu Miu stars Guslagie Malanda with original music & arrangements by Asma Maardof & Daniel Pineda, Koe Namy, Christelle Oviri, and Joseph Schiano di Lombo.

SS24 - SOPHIA AL-MARIA

"What if I told you, you aren't the hero in your own story but the villain in someone else's?"

In this special project for Miu Miu, artist Sophia Al-Maria offers us a multi-dimensional fable set in the eye of a storm. Gravity ∞ Grace stars stuntwoman Ayesha Hussain as archetypal twins who gaslight, gatekeep and girlboss their way through a multi-perspective dreamscape that is both real and a replica. With original music by indigenous composer and artist Divide and Dissolve arranged and with additional composition by Asma Maaroof, Daniel Pineda & Joshua Fay. The show space also features the additional clue answering the question "Is the sky falling?"

Harnessing the power of narrative, Sophia Al-Maria's expansive work across art, literature and television attempts to do what storytelling has always done: transmit the past > share the present > imagine the future. Sophia often works with popular genre tropes and places them in unexpected contexts. From a supernatural teen thriller set in the Victoria and Albert Museum to a time-travelling bromance in the New York Stock Exchange, Sophia's playful engagement with the institutions and power structures which shape our reality has led to solo exhibitions at the Tate Britain, Whitney Museum of American Art and La Biennale di Venezia.

FW23 - GEUMHYUNG JEONG

"There is a codependency, but in the end, machines do not need us. We need them”

Things around us create our movement. The task is to play with objects while respecting the given rules. Playing with soft materials - objects that are designed for our body. What is pre-programmed and what is not?

Geumhyung Jeong is a South Korean artist whose work ranges from performance, dance, choreography, theatre, to video and installation. Since the beginning of her career, Jeong's work has investigated the relationship between the human body and the objects around it. Through productions that combine languages and techniques from contemporary dance, figure theatre and visual arts. In the course of physical interaction between her body and objects, it becomes ambiguous who controls whom, blurring the line between inanimate and animate.

Her work has been exhibited internationally in museums and contemporary art institutions including Tate Modern in London and New Museum in New York. Since her solo exhibition "Homemade RC Toy" at Kunsthalle Basel in 2019. She has built DYI robotic sculptures following a self-taught learning in programming electronic circuits and mechanisms. A process that is compared to stitch-by-stitch sewing. In 2022 she participated in the 59th International Art Exhibition of la Biennale di Venezia with her “Prototype Toy" (2020).

SS23 - SHUANG LI

"Every message is a translation, but nothing has ever been translated".

The seemingly wireless ‘Cloud’ is supported by tens of thousands of kilometers of undersea cabling which populates the ocean floor. Shuang Li's work explores this tension between the material and immaterial, and the obfuscation thereof - the physical bodies of what we commonly think of as immaterial material sent via digital platforms. The messages lost in transmission do not just disappear, but rather, imagined here, can take on another form, punctuating the sky.

Shuang Li (B. 1990, Wuyi Mountains, China) lives and works in Berlin, Germany and Geneva, Switzerland. Situated in globalized communication systems and inspired by various localities and uneven information flows, Li's work, which encompasses performance, interactive websites, sculpture and moving image installations, studies various mediums composing the contemporary digital landscape. Crucial to this practice is the interaction between the medium and its users as well as amongst the mediums themselves. Yet her focus is not limited to the virtual, but also includes the material lives of those digital landscapes, such as the infrastructure and logistics systems that support them, and more importantly, the cracks in between.

Li has had solo shows at Peres Projects, Berlin, Cherish, Geneva. Callie’s, Berlin and Open Forum, Berlin. Li's work is currently featured in the 59th International Art Exhibition of la Biennale di Venezia, The Milk of Dreams, curated by Cecilia Alemani.

FW22 - NATHALIE DJURBERG & HANS BERG

"The animated monster is our repression and anxiety, our hidden collective unconscious, our unacknowledged desires and unspeakable fears - a process of revealing the secrets of the self, and at the same time an encounter with the real other”.*

Since 2004 Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg have worked closely together as an artistic duo through videos. Animations, installations and sculptural works they create narratives suspended between the grotesque and the dramatic and evoke scenarios charged with emotional tension. Djurberg has developed an original style of filmmaking using clay animation, while Berg has composed atmospheric music and hypnotic scores for their videos and installations. Their practice plumbs the depths of human desires and animal instincts enacting myths, legends and singular visions. Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg currently live and work in Alingsäs, Sweden and London, United Kingdom. Born in Lysekil, Sweden in 1978, Nathalie Djurberg received her MFA from Malmó Art Academy, Sweden in 2002. Hans Berg was born in Rättvik, Sweden in 1978 and is a musician, producer and composer, working mainly with electronic music. They have exhibited widely together in solo and group shows, including the 53rd Venice Biennale, Italy in 2009, and their work is featured in several public and private collections around the world.

*Yang Beichen. "Monstrous intimacies". 2021

SS22 - MERIEM BENNANI

Miu Miu Spring Summer 2022 featuring a special video project by artist Meriem Bennani.

Meriem Bennani (b. 1988 in Rabat, Morocco) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She has been developing a shape-shifting practice of films, sculptures and immersive installations, composed with a subtle agility to question our contemporary society and its fractured identities, while amplifying reality through a strategy of magical realism and humour.