Wearing a Hundred Shirts

Wearing a Hundred Shirts will be opened at the Art Hall Gallery on 5 August at 6 pm. The exhibition looks at the T-shirt as an object of material culture in Estonia. Items borrowed from memory institutions, private collections and directly from manufacturers include works of design and art, shirts with a political message, curiosities and ordinary utilitarian shirts, which are used to outline the important issues and developments in the recent past.

The exhibition displays shirts by very different authors: Reet Aus, Kertu Ehala and Ave Teeääre, Marco Laimre, Laivi, Peeter Sepp, Saima Priks, Juku-Kalle Raid, and Johannes Säre among others.

The curators of the exhibition are Sten Ojavee (CCA) and Siim Preiman.

During the 20th century the T-shirt became one of the most widely worn fashion items. It is a cheap and easy means for people and companies to express political, individual, and commercial messages. A gender-neutral T-shirt is often considered one of the most democratic items of clothing, because it is very ambivalent compared to others. It can be worn at work or at home, when doing sports or at a reception. The T-shirt reflects the best and worst features of our modern society.

The former undershirt has become an integral part of the culture of protest and resistance, among other things. Anti-war activists, advocates of women’s rights, environmentalists, as well as many other movements have skilfully used the T-shirt to make their voices heard. Unfortunately, the T-shirt is also a textbook example of mass production and the accompanying over-consumption. The whole world, led by developing countries, is literally drowning in textile waste, including T-shirts. Despite its seeming simplicity and ambivalence, the T-shirt is insidiously complex, and its importance, function, and connotation largely depend on the context of observation.