Tuesday, February 26, 2008
by: Susan Nolan, Ph.D.

London-based artist Margareta Kern will present Clothes for Living and Dying, two projects on cloth, photography, and gender in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. This dynamic multi-media presentation will take place in the Beck Rooms in the Walsh Library on Tuesday, February 26, 2008 at 5:00-6:00 PM, followed by a reception. All are welcome.

Clothes for Living and Dying brings together two interrelated projects.

• Clothes for Death/Odje?a za Smrt documents women in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina who prepare, and set aside, the clothes in which they wish to be buried. Deeply moved upon hearing about this relatively unknown and quite private custom, Kern set out to research it, taking the ritual as a window into exploring questions related to social and cultural constructions of death.

• Graduation Dresses consists of Kern’s photographs of young women in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Their secondary school graduation dresses, made by the artist’s dressmaker mother, are based on images found in the media of celebrities and models wearing haute couture. Kern photographs them in their homes and through this engagement with their personal spaces captures a significant moment in the transitional journey from adolescence to womanhood.

Margareta Kern (born 1974) is a London-based, interdisciplinary artist whose works question ways in which personal spaces are influenced by socio-political movements in our contemporary lives. A graduate of Goldsmiths College (1998), Kern has shown her work extensively in the United Kingdom, including the Tate Modern, Djanogly Gallery, and Castlefield Gallery, and internationally, including a current exhibition in St Louis. For more information about her work please visit www.margaretakern.com

Kern’s talk is sponsored by Seton Hall’s Elizabeth Ann Seton Center for Women’s Studies, Russian and Eastern European Studies Program, Slavic Club, Office of International Programs, and Women’s Resource Center.

For more information please contact:
Women’s Studies, Russian and Eastern European Studies, Office of International Programs, Slavic Club, Women’s Resource Center
(973) 275-2155
nolansus@shu.edu