On pants, shoes, jackets it just sparkles in front of sequins and rhinestones. In the queue in front of the cash register of the Hamburg Museum of Art and Trades, it can be seen very quickly where it is most of the time: on the first floor of the huge historical building for the glitter exhibition. Hard to believe, but the museum is the first exhibition house to devote its own show to the shimmering material. The great interest shows how right it is.
The curators Nina Lucia Groß and Julia Meer are concerned from both sides: as a serious topic and playful moment. The timeline in the anteroom attributes the story back to early past. Neanderthals already used shimmering minerals around 50,000 BC to probably put on make -up.
The ancient Egyptians, especially Cleopatra, also recognized how well they stood them. When glitter make-up in the Renaissance came back into fashion, however, this led to the decimation of entire types of beetles.
© Xenia Curdova
But the exhibition is less interested in a ride in the shooting of the history than a representation of the sustainability of the material and its meaning. Everyone can wear it, nobody who does not have an opinion. Glitzer polarized, draws attention, highlights.
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Glitter bombing: a political act
For some years now, the sparkling shine has not only stood for glamor, show effect and childish desires, but also for empowerment and serves political expression of opinion. In 2019, the Security Minister of Mexico City with Pinkem Glitter demonstrators, after the rape of a young woman had remained without consequences. When they – and not the perpetrators – were then displayed, thousands went on the streets.
In the exhibition, impressive recordings by Argentine photographer Gisela Vola from the previous year can be seen from the demonstrators of the “Green Welle”, a Latin American movement for the right to abortion. The brave young women wear green towels around their neck and a glittering venus level painted around the right eye.
Glitzer only unfolds its effect in the crowd, which also makes the exhibition clear in this example. At the same time, it is a highly individual matter, stores experiences and memories. The “Hall of Glitter” is one of the most beautiful chapters of the exuberant presentation. To prepare the exhibition there was an open call for glittering favorite things, a hundred examples sparkle on shimmering lava stone.
There would be the carefully stored highlight of an older lady, who received special performance from her class teacher in the 1940s. Or the exhausted espadrilles with rhinestones, of which the owner acquired two more couples because she suspected how fleeting the footwear with the braided soles is.
© Sarah van Dyck, exhibition “Glitzer” in the Museum of Art and Trade
The fire-red tournament dress of a Latino dancer immediately moves. You can only wear glitter when the C-Class promotes, and so she glued stone around stone with tweezers with tweezers on her outfit. The dress of a student of Hamburg tells a similar event. In order to be closer to her Star Taylor Swift, she tailored the singer’s costume for the concert visit last year.
The tangible dream in blue is located in the “Sparkle and Shine” department, next to it the spacy jacket that Bill Kaulitz was wearing on the “Humanoid” tour of Tokio Hotel in 2010. The extravagant look with the many glittering stones reveals that the singer wanted to expose himself and tried to hide at the same time. This contradiction is also enrolled to the material.
Glitzer can be loud, trunk, penetrating, especially since it is still in all cracks afterwards. But he also has a sensitive appeal that the pictures of the American photographer Quil Lemons convey.
The 28-year-old now works for the “New York Times” and “Vogue” and gets his own exhibitions in the museum. But during his studies he portrayed his friends very carefully in the dormitory under the title “Glitterboy”: Silbriger Schimmer on black skin, unsafe looks, shy gestures. Today Lemons is one of the protagonists of the LGBTQ movement in New York.
There is already noise from the next room: Under the title “Glittermania”, three dozen chatting girls and women sit at a huge table and make a souvenir on a postcard with film, glue, sequins, pearls, rhinestones. A seven -year -old returns to the exhibition with her work and can be photographed before the video of the Australian duo “The Huxley’s”. The two occur in the glitter bodysuit, wear glitter wigs and dance. The little one shines, the maximum is taken out.
But more is possible: From June 5, the Turkish-Belgian duo: mental clinic will present its installation “Puff Out”, in which twenty vacuum cleaners are used, the fox-colored glitter regularly distributed in the room in order to absorb it again. The traces should remain well after the end of the exhibition.