Lea Vene

Lea Vene (1987, Zagreb/Croatia) is an art historian, cultural anthropologist and fashion theorist. She completed a post master’s degree in Critical Images and R-Lab at the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm, Sweden. She worked as a curator at ETNOFILm festival and Miroslav Kraljević Gallery. She is currently part of the curatorial team of the Organ Vida photography festival and Gallery Močvara. She works as a researcher at the Center for Research of Fashion and Clothing – CIMO and teaches at the Faculty of Textile Technology in Zagreb.

My talk will focus on the concept of soft arts and softness in relation to designer and artistic practice that are based on soft materials (textiles). This research is part of the project BoSA – Briefing On Soft Arts that I co-curate as part of CIMO – Centre for Research of Fashion and Clothing. The BOSA project approaches the materiality and semantics of textiles within the space of textile-textual discourse and traditional handicraft techniques that expand to new meanings of softness in artistic expression. This research transcends “soft” textile architecture and sculpture and verbalizes the relationship between text(iles) and body, text (iles) and politics, text(iles) and performance.