NGV curator Meg Slater leads a conversation with leaders within Australia’s creative community that takes Kusama’s experimental and visionary engagement with fashion, from her radical designs of the late 1960s to her more recent collaborations with brands including Issey Miyake (2000) and Louis Vuitton (2012, 2023), as the starting point to explore fashion as a source of liberation – from the 1960s through to today.

Moderator
Meg Slater is Curator of International Exhibition Projects at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV). Since 2017, Meg has worked on eight of the NGV’s major international exhibitions, including MoMA at NGV: 130 Years of Modern and Contemporary Art, 2018; Keith Haring | Jean Michel Basquiat: Crossing Lines, 2019/20, Pierre Bonnard: Designed by India Mahdavi, 2023; and Yayoi Kusama, 2024/25. Meg was also one of the five curators who organised QUEER: Stories from the NGV Collection, 2022. In 2021, Meg completed a Master of Art Curatorship at the University of Melbourne with First-Class Honours.

Speakers
Paul Yore is one of Australia’s most thought-provoking and consequential multidisciplinary artists. Born in Naarm/Melbourne in 1987, he lives and works on stolen, unceeded Gunaikurnai land. He completed his studies in painting, archaeology and anthropology at Monash University in 2010. Yore’s work engages with the histories of religious art and ritual, queer identity, pop-culture and neo-liberal capitalism, recasting a vast array of found images, materials and texts into sexually and politically loaded tableaux and assemblages which celebrate hybrid and fluid identities, unstable and contradictory meanings, and the glowing horizon of queer worldmaking.

Dr Ricarda Bigolin is an Associate Professor in Fashion Design at RMIT University. Over the past nine years they have led the education and research of the discipline including the Associate Dean of Fashion and Textiles Design (2019 – 2024). Their practice research explores critical tactics and interventions to challenge how fashion is produced and consumed using arts-based and material methods, wearing and performing to reveal relationships between fashion, value and use. Since completing their practice based PhD in 2012 in expanded and critical fashion, their practice work as ‘D&K’, has won international awards and acquisitive prizes producing garments, costumes, performances, exhibitions, texts and films in leading art and design museums, galleries, publications and universities globally.

Scotty So is an artist working across a range of media including photography, painting, sculpture, site-responsive installation, videos and drag performance. Driven by the thrill of camp, he explores the often-contradictory relationship between humour and sincerity within lived experience. Born and raised in Hong Kong, So graduated Bachelor of Fine Art at the Victorian College of the Arts with First Class Honours in 2019. His work has been shown in Hong Kong, China and Australia, including solo exhibitions at MARS Gallery, West Space, Trocadero Art Space and George Paton Gallery in Melbourne. His work was included in the NGV Triennial 2020. So is represented by MARS Gallery in Melbourne and is a past Gertrude Studio Artist (2022–24).

Access
Everyone is welcome at the NGV. We offer a range of accessible resources, facilities, and events. For information, visit our Access webpage or contact us via email at programs@ngv.vic.gov.au or phone; 8620 2222 between 9am-5pm.

Auslan interpretation available on request. Please email your request to programs@ngv.vic.gov.au, allowing a minimum of one week’s notice.

Presented as part of the PayPal Melbourne Fashion Festival’s Independent Programme.