MMP: Regina Möller

She looks at the feminine coded and dominated parts of life – for instance, the home, clothes, sewing, re-cycling and office work. Since the beginning of the ´90s, she has been critically investigating how clothes function as models of identification. Under her own label “embodiment”, Regina Möller has created a collection of alternative clothes that consist of altered (made-over) second-hand clothes. She has even produced fashion reportage with these clothes, but in unusual settings where parallels may be drawn between plants’ and women’s assumed “naturalness”.

Curator: Maria Lind

Another part of “embodiment” is “Generation Jeans” from 1992, which is based on jeans – the international, standardised, young people’s clothing. Both men and women wear jeans, which despite their uniformity, still conform to the body of the wearer. Creases and signs of wear and tear are patched and mended and, in such a way, reflect the individual. In her work, Regina Möller has mended used jeans with colourful patches, which become indirect portraits of the wearer. Identity is one of the central questions in her art and she has particularly focused on the role of biography – real and fictitious – in the formation of the self.

For her Moderna Museet Projekt, Regina Möller is publishing a new issue of her own magazine, “regina”. There have been three issues since the first one in 1994. Regina borrows the format of the woman’s magazine, and like all women’s magazines, it contains interviews and articles on fashion, recepies, travel etc, but with the difference that the artist does not accept the dictates of mass culture as regards what is interesting and important. In “regina”, everything has an edge – often feminist. The magazine reflects the artist’s own interests, and in addition to the fact that it bears her name, she herself is on every cover, visibly older with each issue. “regina” always relates to the context in which it is created: the Swedish issue will, amongst other things, be about design.

Regina Möller’s work both reflects and challenges the traditional means of artistic expression but also how art is created and presented. For her, art institutions function both as locations of production and channels for distribution. Through the magazine “regina”, Regina Möller’s art will be distributed in thousands of copies in Sweden and abroad and will land in people’s bags and on their bedside tables.

Regina Möller was born in 1962 in Munich, and lives and works in Berlin.