Beyond Limit(ation)s exhibition, Cologne

At first blush, it’s difficult to discern just what Hussein Chalayan, Florian Borkenhagen and Zaha Hadid have in common, never mind that they share enough aesthetic DNA to be put together in an exhibition.
But as Gabrielle Ammann gallery makes clear in its new show "Beyond Limit(ations)s", what the fashion designer, artist and architect share -- beyond their membership of a diaspora -- is a sense of movement, impermanence and exile.
That and an innate ability to challenge preconceived notions of what, say, a dress should look like (here, we’re reminded forcibly of Chalayan’s graduate show in which he buried his clothes in his back yard, dug them up and then sent them down the runway); how a pair of chairs can, in Borkenhagen’s prodigious imagination, morph into a mobile confessional; or, in Hadid’s case, why a building should even have walls in the first place.
Beyond Limit(ation)s is neither an ambitious production -- there are only about six pieces on show including video -- nor current; Hadid’s sole entry, the amorphous ’Snowdrift’ sculpture, was created in 2006. But as an unexpected perspective on the interconnection between fashion, art, design and architecture -- where the central theme is a thoughtful, philosophical and often beautiful deconstruction of the familiar -- this is a show worth making time in the diary for.