Latefa Wiersch
Shirts (Boss / Pride / Magic / Nafri)
Title: Latefa Wiersch: Shirts (Boss / Pride / Magic / Nafri), 2021
Year: 2021
Material: Wire, fabric, paint
Dimensions: ca. 8 x 6 x 13 cm
Edition: Unique, with certificate
Price: 500 €
In her fabric dolls, Latefa Wiersch focuses on post-migrant bodies and draws on (dress) codes of pop culture in order to break and reappropriate them. In Fair Play, a fetishized, female-read fabric doll revolts against patriarchy: in a gender struggle governed by dominance and submission, she has—exceptionally and quite literally—seized power. The act of giving oneself a voice is addressed in Who’s laughing now, which references Black girl groups of the 1990s and the conflict between breaking stereotypes while simultaneously being subjected to them through reception and expectation. This ambivalence is also present in the miniature T-shirts, which make processes of identity attribution visible, yet are once again dependent on the logic of consumption.
The annual editions demonstrate the body as a carrier of signs in a raw and provocative manner: while clothing becomes a second skin, the stitched-together faces reflect fragmented biographies as well as the scars and absences left by racism and colonialism.
Latefa Wiersch (*1982 in Dortmund, lives in Zurich) works with performance, sculpture, video, and photography, and for many years has been creating roughly sewn doll figures from differently coded materials such as textiles, clothing, leather, synthetic hair, toys, and found objects, as well as sawn-up furniture, wire, wood, and various stuffing materials. She was a fellow at the Swiss Institute New York (2024) and received the Swiss Art Award (2023) as well as the Swiss Performance Award (2022). In 2026, her work will be shown in group exhibitions at Le Commun and Villa Bernasconi in Geneva, as well as in a solo exhibition at Villa Maraini, Istituto Svizzero, in Rome. Her exhibition „Hannibal“ was awarded the *WESTSTERN Prize in 2025.