CHICKS ON SPEED SCREAMASTRALIA 2013
WELLINGTON: Puppies, Friday March 1st
AUCKLAND: Cassette Nine, Thursday February 28th. Doors from 8pm.
Artist in residence at City Gallery Wellington: TOUCH ME BABY IM BODYCENTRIC, A MULTIMODALPLOSION!
Chicks on Speed is a leading-edge, multimedia art collective blurring the lines between Art, Music, Fashion, New Media technologies and performance.
Over the past 15 years, Chicks on Speed have worked between the worlds of Music, Art & Fashion, creating their own brand of GESAMTKUNSTWERK. Formed at the Munich Art Academy in 1997, they propelled themselves into the world of music, as a commercially functioning pop act, with a special mix of irony & electronic beats, merged with video, choreography and fashion, which was soon labeled Electroclash. Their notorious live performances & stage outfits, led them to work with fashion luminaries including Jeremy Scott, Karl Lagerfeld & JC de Castelbajac; on fashion sound tracks for catwalks, photoshoots & capsule collecions. They’ve collaborated widely in the world of Music, with acts such as B52’s & Yoko Ono, Peaches, Red Hot Chilli Peppers & James Brown.
From 2008-2011, the groups activities culminated in a series of large scale multimedia exhibitions and performances titled ART RULES, which were Staged at museums & foudations; Centre Pompidiou, MoMA, Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, MoMAK Japan, Thyssen Bornesmizsa 21, Vienna, Dundee Contemporary Arts, Serralves Museum, Porto & Craft Victoria, Australia in collaboration with artists: Douglas Gordon, A.L. Steiner, Christopher Just & Anat Ben David.....
In 2013 Chicks on Speed propose a new Project, SCREAM, to merge science and art, through their OBJEKT INSTRUMENTS, that work together with sensorial experiences, in sound and video pastiches, within an interactive spatial setting.The SCREAM performances and installation, premiers this entire collection of Objekt Instruments, self-made Sculptural, wearable accoustic objects or * “fashionable technology”, which have been developed over years of experimentation & praxis. Chicks on Speed are not definers of culture, at times they don’t know the outcome of their experiments, as they’re treading on terroritary that is yet to be mapped out. This is a project in which the actual working process is very important in finding a future means of cultural production, Chicks on Speed are celebrating on a path built by DADA, a detour with The Situationist International, following Fluxus on an off road adventure.
Is it art or is it fashion Does it matter Not if it makes you think. And what I think when I see this is: what a good idea.
Vanessa Friedman, Fashion Editor, Financial Times, London, 2011
Chicks on Speed’s practice blurs the boundaries between creative disciplines but much more than that - their work counters political correctness and employs a range of feminist strategies that support creative radicalism.
Judith Winter, Curator, Dundee Contemporary Arts Craft Research, May, 2010
If these shoes are experiments, then, where can they take us They certainly aren’t made for walking. Though the Chicks have performed with them on stage (in the museum gallery no less), they also seem perfectly at home under lights, on a plinth. And there is something about them that denotes their makers’ interest in celebrity. Later prototypes were designed with Lady Gaga in mind; even for her, they’d arguably be an upgrade. So these are shoes that are made to be looked at. But at the same time, they feel empowering, and not just in the way that spiky heels usually do. If a shoe can be an electric guitar; if fashion designers can be contemporary artists and pop stars, all at once; and if a museum gallery can be a nightclub, then who knows what else might be possible
Glenn Adamson, Head of Research, Victoria&Albert Museum, London Chicks on Speed Don’t Art, fashion, Music! Published by Booth Clibborn Editions, 2011
Over the past three years they’ve taken their multi-genre ethic a step further, voluntarily locking themselves in an attic to focus their boundless creative energy and ambition on a plot to use technology to destroy the conventional boundaries between Music, Art and Fashion once and for all.
SuperSweet, Japan, 2010
Don’t fashion, Don’t talk to Jesus, Don’t be a diva, don’t remember, Don’t make history, Don’t be naked, Don’t be nice, Don’t sign a contract, Don’t hug your cat, Don’t rule, Don’t think, Don’t Fluxus. Don’t Dream.
Chicks on Speed, 2012
