Wishing on My Falsies
- A Maior
- Katayoon Yousefbigloo
Western Front is pleased to present Wishing on My Falsies, an exhibition of the collective A Maior and the multidisciplinary artist Katayoon Yousefbigloo that explores the mythmaking potential of playing dress-up. Inspired by the superstition of wishing on fallen eyelashes, the exhibition title reinterprets this ritual through a synthetic channel for desire, reflecting A Maior and Yousefbigloo’s interest in the aspirations and delusions that drive modes of self-fashioning.
A Maior is a clothing and home goods store managed by artist Bruno Zhu and his family, which doubles as a collective and curatorial platform. For the exhibition, A Maior presents a pair of images from the lookbook series Fall/Winter (2023–24). Displayed as billboard-sized wallpapers, the work showcases grandmother Yu Yan performing the role of Model/Icon in an editorial cosmetics campaign, above a photograph of the inside of her fridge. Functioning as faux advertisements, the diptych offers contrasting scales of intimacy between persona and reality, glamour and banality, and the commercial and the domestic. Wrapping parallel walls, Fall/Winter engages visual techniques inspired by Renaissance painting to elongate the gallery, creating a disorienting spatial illusion that further emphasizes A Maior’s production of artifice.
Katayoon Yousefbigloo is a founding member of the artist collective Liquidation World and serves as the creative director of P.L.U.R.O.M.A. (Peace, Love, Unity, Respect, Oxygen, Music, Autonomy), an ongoing performance project that takes the form of a fashion label and seasonal DIY runway shows. Leading up to the third season of P.L.U.R.O.M.A., an anonymous person began tagging “sellout $cum” on the facade of Liquidation World’s retail/studio space—critiquing the institutional partnership with the Polygon Gallery to produce the event. In response, Yousefbigloo’s new installation Kiosk (2025) appropriates this tag as part of her brand and presents a dramatic reimagining of this incident through the perspective of four characters—The Vandal, Security, The Pedestrian, and The Coworker. Video, sound, photocopies, and screenprinted clothing are gathered as fictional evidence displayed on a structure that mimics a mall kiosk. In developing this installation, Yousefbigloo also shopped Western Front’s archive for iconic designs to bootleg. “The Hand of the Spirit” and “FETISH” motifs from the 1970s, along with a signed letter from British avant-garde group Throbbing Gristle, are copied and altered across shirts and accessories, reflecting a lineage of performance practices at Western Front that engage fashion, branding, and persona.
Together, the works spatially and materially toy with the thresholds of authenticity, subverting and spoofing signifiers of glamour, luxury, labour, and class to consider how an identity is styled. In a blend of the imagined and the everyday, the artists appropriate commercial language as a world-building vocabulary, constructing characters that reveal their own fiction.
A live performance by Katayoon Yousefbigloo took place during the opening reception, on January 11, 2025.
In February 2025, Western Front will host the artist Bruno Zhu of A Maior for a residency in which he will lead a series of workshops with local writers towards the development of the sequel novella to Retail Vérité (2023).
Curated by Kiel Torres.
About the Artists
A Maior is a clothing and home goods store located in the outskirts of Viseu, Portugal. Since 2016, an eponymous exhibition program has been hosted within the shopping environment. A Maior is managed by the staff, the artist Bruno Zhu, and his family. A Maior has been featured in exhibitions at Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam; Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem; Kunsthalle Freeport, Porto; X Museum, Beijing; Life Sport and BQ, both Berlin. In 2022, A Maior was the writer-in-residence at San Serriffe in Amsterdam, who commissioned Retail Vérité, A Maior’s first novella.
Katayoon Yousefbigloo is an Iranian-born interdisciplinary artist and musician based on the traditional territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh, and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ Nations (Vancouver, Canada). Through video, music, writing, performance, and visual art she examines how media shapes our mythologies. She investigates potential sites of aesthetic, spiritual, and collective transformation found both materially in undefined or forgotten physical spaces, as well as those embedded within the mass media landscape. Yousefbigloo is a founding member of Liquidation World, an art collective that hosts exhibitions, performances, workshops, fashion shows, and other events.
Accessibility
Western Front’s gallery is a ground-floor, wheelchair-accessible space with a partially accessible all-gender bathroom. Further details about visiting and accessibility at Western Front can be found here.
Acknowledgements
Presented with support from the Audain Foundation.
Western Front is a non-profit artist-run centre in Vancouver.
We acknowledge the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations as traditional owners of the land upon which Western Front stands.