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Riitta Ikonen and Her Tribe Beyond Regalia - in the Streets of Prague!
Beyond Regalia will showcase the fruits of the labors of retirees from the Malešice Home for the Elderly, Prague and artist Riitta Ikonen. The group will take to the streets of Prague to display their handmade regalia that prove that beauty, age, and creativity can be synonymous. This multidisciplinary visual art and performance program will feature bright colors, uncommon materials, and innovative fashions.
The tribe will start on Sunday June 21 at 3 pm from Naprstek Museum.
Upright Regalia is a continuation of the Wearable Art Class, which started in 2013 as a collaboration between members of the Hamilton Madison House City Hall Senior Center in New York and a team of international artists comprising Riitta Ikonen (Finland), Alison Kuo (US), Yue Lin (China), Wei Xiaoguang (China), Karoline Hjorth (Norway), and Annie Collinge (UK). The project began with a meeting between costume maker and performer Riitta Ikonen and the blogger behind Accidental Chinese Hipsters, Alison Kuo, in which the two declared their intentions to make art with the dynamic and fashionable senior residents of Chinatown.
Riita Ikonen
Originally from Finland, Riitta Ikonen (b.1981) completed her BA at the University of Brighton and MA at the Royal College of Art, London. She was nominated for Ars Fennica, Finland's biggest art prize, in 2014, and exhibits, lectures and performs internationally. Her recent works have been in exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, London 2012 Olympic Park, Victoria & Albert Museum, Photographer's Gallery and Gulbenkian Foundation. She works from both New York and Finland.
Description of work: Riitta Ikonen's work threads memory, myth, imagination and a romantic view of the natural world through a series of long-term projects pursued alone or with regular collaborators. Using performance and photographic portraiture to investigate the various ways humanity occupies and interprets the natural world. Making regalia of natural elements like twigs and leaves she weaves together questions of humanism and power of the raw landscape. These compositions represent people and land with equal significance. By working with older people within these age-old landscapes, Ikonen considers the human desire for longevity and permanence. Suggesting we should never stop examining representation and mythology and our need to imbue value or privileging one world over another - all this while recognizing the tenuous line found between beauty, humor and danger.
More about Tribes - here.
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Tribes, Finland, Riitta Ikonen - Beyond Regalia, photo: Wearable Art Class 2014
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