I Always Wanted to Show You Mine, is the debut solo exhibition of designer and artist Nasir Mazhar.

 

Mazhar’s radical approach to clothing and collectivity has resolved to world-build and organise genuine community against the backdrop of neo-liberal order, privatisation and cultural hegemony.

 

His practice has identified fashion as the medium through which he works key interests in power, beauty, desire and solidarity. The work has always leant into sculptural practice as illustrated by his headwear, masks, eyewear, as well as his radical costume making for Ballet Lorent.

 

This exhibition presents sequences from Mazhar’s vast archive of process documentation to locate his practice within the history of art and artists who have turned to garment making, textiles, styling and image making to articulate distinct psycho-social, intimate and political positions.

 

Between 2017 and 2019, after numerous seasons at London Fashion Week, Mazhar turned his back on the relentless season cycle and instead launched Fantastic Toiles, a horizontal organisation that has seen many young and established designers support each other as they try and subsist in a broken economy.

 

Mazhar’s rejection of the mania of the fashion business and its rapacious demand for polished and flawless (read: blunted and bland) commodities is evident in his deeply intuitive and reflexive process of bringing studio detritus and scrap materials together in an evolving and infinite development phase.

 

Body armour, period silhouettes, ancient utilitarian dress, 18th Century dumb show aesthetics, and speculative fiction are all synthesised, landing on a distinctive visual language.

 

The self portraits and objects in this exhibition chart two decades worth of studiobased experimentations wherein Mazhar, in his own words, has strived to not “kill an idea” by overworking it, but rather to work instinctively to produce indefinite and negotiable objects.