21st Faith

20
Flat Pack Plastic Pants,
by Anna Baumgart.
Flat Pack Plastic Pants relates to the idea of Faith as a simultaneously individual
and collective practice.
The opening night featured the live improvised performance of The Golden
Trouser Tours, bringing individuals together through a collective experience of dress.
Multiple pairs of nearly identical gold fake leather trousers lay in folded compositions
in a white square. At intervals throughout the evening, performers came and began
to unfold the trousers, interacting and playing with them.
Putting them on, they invited visitors to join them and walk around the exhibition
in a group. In turns, one person would lead and the rest would copy, performing certain
movements with the trousers, e.g. taking them on and off at different points around
the room and responding to other artworks.
The trousers are special for their quality of being notably flat, yet in contact with
the body transition into sculptural shells. Here exists a reciprocal dialogue between body
and garment, each influencing the other’s movements. After undressing, the trousers
are left with a bodily demeanor, as empty shells emphasising the ephemeral presence
and absence of individual bodies, marking their traces left behind.
Like faith, the trousers represent how one common thing can bring together individuals.
Although similar, each golden trouser is made as a slightly different size or shape,
representing how people can still remain individuals in a collective.
In between performances, the ways in which the trousers were left arranged
as shells in the space was always different according to how each individual undressed
them there. This formed a continuously shifting landscape of golden trousers, therefore
a constantly changing artwork.
Anna: anna_baumgart@outlook.com, @anna_baumgart