NEW DML 2019 COLLECTION

“At Limanka Fashion House, we believe that fashion is the sum of small things: how you live, how you breathe, speak, or create. All of this is always at the forefront. We are passionate people who, just like you, want to be a revolution!” On February 22, 2019, our defunct anti-capitalist brand opened its first—and last—original showroom at the Museum of Art in Łódź—an institution with one of the oldest collections of modern art in the world. Drawing on their exceptional collections, we created the New Collection. Avant-garde prints, plagiarism, and a shared commitment to the constant expansion of the overproduction of art and fashion constitute our brand’s DNA. We want to play a significant role in demystifying complex artistic concepts. When designing our products and stores, we strive to think from the perspective of appropriation and a mercantile approach to art. We want our clothes to support the growth of your symbolic capital, and our stores to be like a magnificent exhibition for you. Long live the retail space!

The BURDEN blouse, which you can try on in our store, is a perfect example of how we combine our two greatest passions—theft and kitsch. BURDEN is a direct rip-off of this avant-garde art pioneer’s work. It’s made of environmentally unfriendly polyester, which will serve as a traditional, non-biodegradable element of nature’s decor for the next 150 years. See if this performance suits you and be sure to visit our showroom at Galeria ms1.

Limanka Fashion House

The exhibition was part of the “Prototypes” project, which explores the titular concept using works from the Museum of Art’s collection. As part of the project, invited artists use works from the museum’s collection to attempt to model contemporary reality. Through their work, the museum’s collection is transformed into a repository of practices and methods awaiting updating, reuse, and reactivation. The reuse of existing works and the testing of their potential in altered contexts reflects a commitment to sustainability—in an ecological spirit—in the production of new works.

The “prototype”—that is, a concept that can serve as a starting point for solutions capable of transforming reality—also provides the framework for the institution’s entire program this year. Art is conceived here as a source of inspiration for new communal narratives, a testing ground for the critical and subversive potential of artistic gestures, but also as a resource of forms to be reused in a production cycle set in motion by successive generations of artists. Viewed in this light, art no longer serves to illustrate existing ideas—social, political, or any other—but becomes a laboratory where new solutions, potentially socially or politically significant, are forged.

The series of exhibitions organized as part of the “Prototypes” project aims to create an open catalog of activities that can be undertaken using the museum’s collection. It represents an experiment in approaching the Art Museum’s fundamental mission—to serve as a bridge between art and the public—this time achieved through artistic means.

Acknowledgments: Bartosz Bart, Ignacy Ciszewski, Jakub Dylewski, Alex Freiheit, Aleksandra Grabarz, Martyna Konieczny, Edmund Krempiński, Alicja Kujawska, Anna Malinowska, ms17, Ola Rudnicka, Jana Shostak, Kinga Witkowska, Karolina Wojtas, Anna Zagrodzka