Chicks on Speed @ DCA

You may have heard of them in the realm of electroclash with their record label Chicks on Speed Records (artists represented include Le Tigre). You may have heard about them in the world of fashion, upcoming events including Fashion Party as part of Sonar in Barcelona. Maybe it was in performance art? Video? Chicks on Speed’s practice extends far beyond any easy categorisation, mixing up elements that include music making, DIY fashion, product design, performance and God knows what else to produce work which is simultaneously fun and very very serious.

Chicks on Speed are a multinational collective who started in Munich in 1995 when core members Alex Murray-Leslie and Melissa Logan, students at the Academy of Fine Arts, set up an illegal bar, motivated by a desire to create a place where creatives could get together and exchange ideas, have a party, collaborate. From the outset they have blurred the line between art, performance and music, a cross fertilisation which was rather less widely accepted then than it is now. Their work has developed since to include elements of fashion, taken from their homemade performance costumes, and technology.

For the DCA Chicks are creating a show called Don’t Art, Fashion, Music, a title which clearly emphasises the disciplinary contradiction inherent in their work. They take an evolutionary approach, keeping successful elements from each artwork and performance and incorporating them into the next piece, building and expanding as they go. For Dundee, they will be bringing a theremin tapestry, a weaving incorporating the non-contact space age musical instrument on which they will plan to play an image. New works (collectively called Objekt Instruments) include the world’s first wireless stiletto guitar, a golden marvel created in collaboration with shoe designer Max Kibardin and three years in the making. Funding from the show has enabled them to industrialise the design and put it into production, and the opening performance will see its debut. The instrument plays with gender roles in its more high-minded moments, without losing a sense of fun and old-fashioned entertainment.

The exhibition will open with a performance by the collective, using their various instruments, costumes, a bespoke stage and who knows what else. The event will be recorded, looped and introduced to the space alongside other video works, specially commissioned print wallpaper, and a team of weavers fashioning a stage curtain from within the stage over the course of the residency. There are also banners (some made during a performance in Abidjan on the Ivory Coast). Essentially, Chicks On Speed’s DCA exhibition looks set to be an unpredictable and riotous affair quite unlike anything we have seen before.