Spotlight for Grace Ndiritu
Grace Ndiritu and ZELDA Co-Founders Kate Phillimore and Mary Cork
We asked Grace Ndiritu and the curators from ZELDA a few questions to understand more about Grace’s install of her COVERSLUT© project at the JW Anderson Flagship store. Photos from the preview can be found here.
COVERSLUT© focuses on issues of race, gender and class politics. It incorporates Capitalist, Pay What You Can and Ethical/Environmental strategies into its economic framework. The concept for COVERSLUT© is inspired by Ndiritu's book on youth culture Dissent Without Modification.
How did you come about working together?
We’ve followed and been admirers of Grace’s practice for years, so when we heard about the opportunity to make a proposal for AWITA in the context of JWA’s Soho store, the COVERSLUT© project instantly sprang to mind. Her gallery, Arcade, was a huge support in helping us build a relationship with Grace.
Aside from obvious ties to the fashion industry, we couldn’t have imagined having a better place to present the project in a way that it hasn’t been seen before; in a genuine high fashion setting with the support of a forward thinking label like JW Anderson, and to an audience that has likely never encountered it.
What did you have to consider when installing this work in a fashion brand store compared to previous venues?
Past iterations of COVERSLUT© have historically been commissioned by visual arts organisations. For example, as a pop-up shop within a gallery space, or a workshop or performance-led event where the actual production of the garments has been experienced by audiences alongside a display of actual clothing items for sale.
The installation at JW Anderson offers us a unique chance to display the breadth of what’s been produced by COVERSLUT© to date. We had to consider carefully how best to present the articles of clothing produced through the project amongst JW Anderson’s own line of clothing. What modes of display could we use to make that differentiation and draw attention to the activity that underpins COVERSLUT© as well as the clothing itself?
Showing existing garments, objects and ephemera, including hand-painted signs and woodblocks used to print on fabric, allows us to highlight the project’s accomplishments as an ongoing fashion and economic research project, the many forms its taken and types of products made, and also to direct new people to ways of buying items to support the project through the PAY-WHAT-YOU-CAN model it employs.
How does the setting of Soho play into the meaning of Grace’s work?
We were interested in the history of the Soho as a site of non-homogeneity, dissent and activism, which are echoed beautifully in the ethos that drives Grace’s COVERSLUT© project.
What do you envision for the future of the COVERSLUT© project
I see COVERSLUT© continuing to develop two ways. Firstly as an art project whose collection of Haute Couture clothing gets acquired and displayed in museums such as the V&A etc. But also continuing its social practice through establishing the label in a new local community in the UK, working with refugees and young artists which makes its limited edition Ready to Wear collection, possibly in collaboration with a large brand like H&M or Urban Outfitters, but which continues to be sold as Pay What You Can with anti-sweatshop ethics, the concept upon which COVERSLUT© was first founded.
Grace, what is inspiring you at the moment?
Lots of things but especially the cinematic experience. Film inspires my work in fashion. My new film Becoming Plant has been selected for the BFI London Film Festival and will be screening on 14 October at 8.45pm at the ICA. Being part of the festival is great as I can meet other filmmakers and gain solidarity in that community as well as the art world.
Grace Ndiritu (b.1982, Birmingham) is an artist whose artworks are concerned with the transformation of our contemporary world. Recently, her debut short film Black Beauty has been selected for prestigious film festivals including 72nd Berlinale in the Forum Expanded section (2022) and 32nd FIDMarseille (2021). Ndiritu has been featured in TIME magazine, Phaidon’s The 21st Century Art Book, BOMB magazine, Art Monthly and Elephant magazine. Her work is housed in museum collections such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), The British Council and The Modern Art Museum (Warsaw). Her writing has been published in her critical theory book Dissent Without Modification (Bergen Kunsthall) in 2021; The Whitechapel Gallery in the Documents of Contemporary Art anthology series; Animal Shelter Journal,Semiotext(e) The MIT Press; Metropolis M; and The Oxford University Press.
More information about Grace’s work can be found on the website.
https://www.coverslutfashion.com