She’s wearing what looks like a helmet. Only she can’t see anything because the thing wraps around her whole head. She touches her face slowly and carefully. Whether in front, on the side or behind, small eyes, noses and mouths are everywhere. In different colors. Their alter egos, like the Finnish artist Mammo Rauhala it calls staring at the camera.
The video runs in the exhibition “Fashion for Bank Robbers”, which can currently be seen in the Maximiliansforum. Image and video material by around 240 artists appears in the continuous loop, dealing with the topic of “masks”, which is so popular at the moment. In this case, but in a more enjoyable way. The fact that the mask interpretations are only audiovisually prepared allows the viewers a wide variety of impressions. If you happen to pass the underpass between Maximilianstraße and Altstadtring, the sibyl-like music will lure you to linger a little underground. The project was curated by jewelry artist and mask maker Carina Shoshtary. She has been on the Instagram page of the same name since 2018 “Fashion for bank robbers”, selects suitable works by other creative people and thus offers contemporary artists a platform. Now the Munich native is presenting the variety of masks outside of the Instagram bubble for the first time.
When the Maximiliansforum offered her to plan an exhibition, she immediately agreed, because here you can’t just keep swiping like on Instagram: “The individual pictures stay for quite a long time, and so in contrast to Instagram it’s a slower, but also more intense way of looking at the pictures,” says Shoshtary. Large screens not only counteract fleeting consumption on social networks, but also offer the eyes more than just a smartphone screen.
There are also creative and often elaborately produced short films and videos as well as interviews and quotes from the artists. What are they trying to express with their masks? For the Canadian-Japanese artist Miya Turnball it’s all about “The beauty versus the grotesque (a blurring of boundaries) and the duality of ‘bi-racial’ identity and being in-between,” she quotes. Turnball mostly creates three-dimensional self-portraits, some of which split in two from forehead to chin or appear to be peeling. So she tries to explore human identity. Belonging to two or even more ethnic groups creates a dichotomy that (in the case of Turnball’s masks) literally tears at a search for meaning. In the “Fashion for Bank Robbers Community” which now has more than 300,000 followers (including fashion magazines such as 032c from Berlin) she finds an ideal “safe place”.
A latex suit becomes a full-body mask
“Only a few really only make masks. I often have the impression that the work becomes a mask when the artists want to explore and push their limits. Then, for example, make-up can become a mask. Or hair. Or jewellery.” , says Carina Shoshtary. Or wearable art. Because many of the artists free their masks from the typical idea of being only for the face and expand their radius to cover the entire body. The best example is the work of latex artists “Electric Adam” – he slips into a tight-fitting pink-turquoise latex suit. A vacuum cube, known from the fetish scene, adorns his head to match. According to the artist’s own statements, the whole thing should be maintained by his breath.
From bizarre to avant-garde, from fashionable representations to costumes – the exhibition shows the different approaches of photographers, sculptors, drag queens and drag kings, make-up artists and other creative people to the topic “mask”. But as diverse as the illustrations are here, “my dream is to someday realize an exhibition in which the masks themselves are also shown,” Shoshtary emphasizes.
fashion for bank robbers, Maximilian Forumunderpass Maximilianstr./corner Altstadtring, until Oct. 16