LUCKY DAY is a project by Alexine Chanel including a performance event featuring Sharmili Akther Lucky. The event will take place on Thursday, 17 March at 5 pm in the Nouvelle Vague auditorium of the Alliance Française de Dhaka.
The Lucky Day project will be part of the exhibition, “On the 21st century’s own settlement form – Manifesto of Post-Informality” by HABITAT FORUM BERLIN, in cooperation with the Weissensee School of Art, curated by Günter Nest and Elisa Bertuzzo, in Berlin in 2017. “I am Lucky, but I am not lucky” These are Lucky’s own words. She uttered them shortly after meeting Alexine in the streets of Karai Basti, a self-organized settlement in Dhaka. Lucky then began to spin her sad tale, which has been recorded and will be rewritten as a “Banglawood” pop song.
Lucky is a textile worker, one of the many thousands of essentially invisible women making clothes for foreign consumers. Lucky is the star of this show, in stark contrast to her daily life. It may seem that nobody outside Karai Basti knows about her work, existence, or presence, especially not the foreign consumers who buy the clothes she makes. Yet on this “Lucky Day”, she will become a star and perform, signing an H&M t-shirt of the “Conscious” range, made in Bangladesh, bought in Berlin, and flown back to Dhaka for the event. She will sign this highly significant “article” – an item owned by almost “everyone” in the world, yet made on an industrial scale by thousands of invisible hands belonging to “anyones”, or even to “no-ones”, thousands of kilometres away from the sales shelves – with her name, like an artist, in a starkly theatricalised event, thoroughly covered by the press. The Tshirt, signed by Lucky, the artist, and therefore transformed into an artwork of inestimable value, will be brought back to Berlin to be exhibited and potentially auctioned off.
Lucky Day opens up a space of negotiation between anonymity and subjectivity. It strives to break the textile chain of anonymity with a single life story, to jumpstart our consciousness, make us aware of the existence of the worker as a persona grata with a life and a personality, problems, hopes, dreams and desires. Lucky Day aims at summoning up the presence, of the “makers” of any bought garment available for sale on the western consumer shelves. This event is part of a larger project called “APPAREIL” which concentrates its focal point on the phenomenon of anonymisation in the global economy and through this multinational industry; and the consequent discrepancies it creates in local markets. Further events and exhibitions in Berlin are planned in 2016 and 2017. – Alliance Francaise, Dhaka press release
