Anonymous Club - The Glass Ceiling

After the July relaunch of his fashion label “Hood by Air,” Creative Director Shayne Oliver announces his first project as Anonymous Club – The Glass Ceiling presented at Luma Westbau in Zurich. 

The brand’s meteoric rise through the 2010s birthed first connections in contemporary art, music and culture–far-reaching beyond the expectation of a common fashion house. In creating Hood By Air (HBA), Shayne Oliver defined the collaborative process that now powers Anonymous Club. 

As Oliver states: 
“Gentrification leaves no physical space for new, influential ideas to exist or reside. So Hood By Air and Anonymous Club will be a place for these ideas to have a home.” 

Anonymous Club operates as an independent residency project supporting the cultivation of emerging talents and realizing their vision through business and product. Following the footsteps of HBA runways and showings at Pitti Uomo, MADE LA and beyond, Anonymous Club blurs the lines between contemporary art, music, performance and the notion of 21st century lifestyle. 

Luma Westbau serves as a production site and studio for Anonymous Club’s residents and throughout the coming months new sound-, video- and performance works are to be released. The Glass Ceiling is part music video set, part futurist dreamscape or simply apocalyptic debris of retail space and its growing architecture designed in collaboration with sub. Alongside it, individual happenings occur this fall and culminate in a total environment in spring 2021.

On Friday, September 11 and Thursday, October 1 prologue performances by LEECH are taking place, accompanied by the reveal of first spatial fragments. Anonymous Club announces Hood By Air-Alumni’s Josh Johnson and Boychild as performance directors. 

The project is curated by Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen.

Anonymous is the circus, and its residents are the performers. The coming project with Luma Westbau is a way of complicating those identities. In order to put together an exhibition during the pandemic we assembled a series of stand ins. Avatars who will take the place of residents and activate Luma’s space through performance—person, persona and performer all mixing together. Actors and dancers will imitate the residents and videos of their performances will further activate the space. Here, the residents themselves become a source of inspiration for movement and behavior—a reference for their own work.

By building the constituent parts / ephemera / evidence of something before it’s happened, we’re pushing further into fantasy and illusion. The show closes out with climactic performances from residents, and until that time the space is occupied by ghosts and doppelgängers. When residents finally arrive, they will be forced to confront their own image and take on the challenge of outdoing their best work. 

-Anonymous Club