If you have any friends or family living in Australia that are die hard Ziggy fans, they’ll be ecstatic to hear about the upcoming ‘David Bowie Is’ retrospective exhibition.
The event takes place at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne from July 2015. The exhibition covers five decades of the singer’s career, and will feature more than 300 objects from Bowie’s personal archive and shows the pioneering artists’ creations in the fields of fashion, sound, film and art.
The singer is personally involved with the David Bowie Archive, which includes more than 75,000 objects. Bowie collaborated with the collection’s archivist Sandy Hirshkowitz, as well as curators Victoria Broackes and Geoffrey Marsh, to choose costumes, footage and memorabilia for the exhibition.
Curator, Broakes, spoke about what it was like choosing items from the museum-like Bowie warehouse: “It is an archive of his own designs, drawings, ideas, photographs, costumes and so on,” he said. “For the most part, a lot of it was simply kept. It just wasn’t thrown away. And then about 10 years ago, it was gathered together and added to. It really is quite extraordinary. There’s nothing like it in popular culture.”
David Bowie Is, was originally shown in London, it was a sell-out, with more than 300,00 visitors cramming in to see the show. Since then, it has toured around the world, being shown in Toronto, Chicago, Sao Paulo and Berlin.
The collection includes:
More than 50 stage costumes including Ziggy Stardust bodysuits (1972) designed by Freddie Burretti;
Music videos by David Mallet including Boys Keep Swinging (1979) and Let’s Dance (1983);
Set designs created for the Diamond Dogs tour (1974);
Kansai Yamamoto’s flamboyant creations for the Aladdin Sane tour (1973);
Photographs by Helmut Newton, Brian Duffy and John Rowlands;
Album sleeve artwork by Guy Peellaert and Edward Bell; and
Excerpts from films and live performances including Top of the Pops (1972), The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) and Saturday Night Live (1979).
If you can’t make the trip to Auz, and are looking for somewhere a little closer to home, the exhibit will be visiting the Netherlands in early 2015 and Paris from March to May 2015.
