The Folds of the Revolution, 2017, Zero Fold, Cologne
Maison Tatline, 2018, tête, Berlin

"We must also emphasize the fundamental importance of the fact that Tatlin designed the clothes “for himself“ so to speak. He personally supervised the making of the jacket, coat, and suit models in the workshop of the Petroodezhda (from 1924 Leningradodezhda Trust „Leningrad - Clothing“), tried them on personally and presented them himself. (...)

Thus, he designed the “150,000,000“ * type apparel as if he had designed it for himself. Such a valuation category was essentially democratic. The clothing models of this new type exerted a great effect on the rapporteurs at the exhibition of Petrograd artists when they were presented to the public for the first time in 1923. But Tatlin‘s ideas – like so many others in the renewal of material culture – were not able to break through the intellectual and technical limitations, despite the recognition they often found. Decades later they became a worldwide trend."

• This is a reference to Mayakovsky´s Poem 150,000,000, which he wrote in the name of one hundred and fifty million people – the population of Russia at that time - intentionally omitting his own name as author

Unlike his other Constructivist artist colleagues at the Moscow Institute of Artistic Culture, Russian artist Vladimir Tatlin (1885 - 1953) did not design the coat as workwear, but as both everyday and festive clothing. Tatlin considered it a programmatic task to assign a new social and cultural function to clothing and designed type clothing in series production, forerunners of the democratic prêt-à-porter. Wearing this clothing was ultimately intended to make the wearer a "better" person and have an effect on their consciousness.

With the production of usable artworks, Alexandra Hopf once again reflects on the concept of the "avant-garde", which she constantly addresses in her work: Today, in times of explosive political upheaval, the question arises no less than 100 years ago as to how much the boundaries between art and everyday life can be maintained, and where one locates oneself as an artist between an idealistic view of art as a medium that changes consciousness and its defence as an aesthetic counter-design, which ultimately also means retreating from the current.

What contribution does art make in its own way to shaping society? If art is not seen as the production of messages, but rather as the production of art with its increasing tendency towards mimicry and assimilation, then it has a subtle influence on thought, aesthetic perception and thus indirectly on political action. However, their fusion with everyday things also results in their appropriation in the sense of economisation and profanisation.
The problem of the "self-cancellation" of artistic production in the oscillation between avant-garde progression and constituent recourse was and is also immanent to every political revolution.

(Birgit Laskowski on the occasion of The Folds of the Revolution, Zerofold, Cologne, 2017)