I was at the Sea Life Aquarium watching the stingrays fly their little angel loops before me when I felt it. A warmth burgeoning between my ribs, spreading across my chest like I had been shot. It was exhilarating.
That was in 2021. I’ve since experienced this sensation a few more times. It seems to flourish when my world turns on a new angle, showing me a side I never knew existed. I’ve learned to appreciate and savour it when it comes. Most recently, that was while attending QAGOMA’s exhibit: Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses.
Iris van Herpen is a genius or someone deeply in love with what she does. To me, those are the same thing. Every dress was a cosmic warp, a transmission beamed to me from some unseen galaxy. Her Hyrdrazoa dress sits like a coral reef fish, wavering like seaweed under the gallery’s pumped-in air. Dresses with names like Radiography, Aeriform, Tansegrity, Henosis, Harmonia, and Hypnosis stand like warheads on their podiums, racing to your mind as they destroy what you thought fashion was, and show you what it now is. As I finished one part of the exhibition and walked across the corridor to the other side I caught the eye of an attendant. We spoke in tones reserved for cathedrals or funerals. I couldn’t, and still can’t, believe that some of these dresses were made when she was in her mid-twenties.
One of the few things I can articulate about my deep respect for van Herpen’s work is how everything has the potential for inspiration. From the Great Barrier Reef to the Large Hadron Collider, van Herpen eschews the limited binary of ‘art vs. science’ so many of us impose upon ourselves. Outside the walls of Sculpting the Senses we sanitise our world with concepts like biology, technology, astronomy, STEM, and other meaningless terms, inside these walls, however, everything is art, everything is celebrated.
The non-van Herpen inclusions are no slouch, either. Unlike some exhibitions where any associated works or artists are just thrown in on some loose thread (I recall a Kandinsky exhibition where the associated artist was included seemingly only on the basis that he ‘also used circles’) the entirety of this exhibition passes with flying colours. Kohei Nawa’s PixCell-Double Deer #4, Casey Curran’s Daphne, Ferrucio Laviani’s Good Vibrations Cabinet, and Michael Pitiot and Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s Planet Ocean all hum to the same resonance set by van Herpen.
Sculpting the Senses was like watching a flower bloom in complete radiance. Bristling at height, screaming in beauty, then bowing to the weight of sunset and returning to dirt. In the last room Masha Vasyukova’s Earthrise was playing, a seven-minute-long video of skydiver Domitille Kiger flying through an endless sky in one of van Herpen’s creations. She never touches the ground. Leaving the gallery, I reflected on how I knew exactly how she felt.
Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses was on display at the QAGOMA until October 7th.
