Textile (Textile)

Risham Syed discovered a box of woven Chinese silk panels that was her mother’s most prized possession. Her mother had long talked about making quilts with these panels; there were many questions about what she would do with so many panels, which were ultimately used to compose Risham Syed’s work Ali Trade Center Series IV (with Buddleia) . After her mother’s death, Syed began to explore the history of this fabric as a material linked to commerce, power, social class, and culture, and thus linked to a history of violence, hardship, upheaval, and conflict.

Textile (Textile)

The title of this work by Egle Jauncems, The Paler King I , is taken from an unfinished novel by the late David Foster Wallace called The Pale King, published posthumously in 2015. Jauncems notes that the book is fragmented, following unrelated characters struggling with ennui and depression, navigating the pressures of modern reality. In her art practice, Jauncems has been interested in the lives of powerful and influential men for many years.

Textile (Textile)

Like most of Laura Rokas’s hand-stitched works, Once in Two Moons was made while she sat in bed, imbuing the work with a tender sense of domestic intimacy. The scene’s dominant figure is a faceless woman whose blood red, dagger-like fingernails, polka dot jacket, and jet black hair resemble a sort of avatar of the artist. The figure surveys a chaotic scene that might be described as a “cute apocalypse” (a phrase Rokas says is characteristic of her work in general).

Textile (Textile)

Designed by the artist and fabricated in collaboration with Kashmiri artisans in India, Baseera Khan’s Psychedelic Prayer Rugs combine visual iconography traditional to Islam, such as the crescent moon and lunar calendar, with brightly coloured symbols of personal significance to the artist: a pair of embroidered sneakers, a fragment of an Urdu poem, and the Purple Heart medal. Visually seductive yet charged with political and symbolic associations, the rugs bridge elements of American popular culture with aspects of Islamic worship that may be poorly understood in contemporary secular contexts. Encouraged by Khan to take their shoes off and interact with the rugs, viewers participate in a decolonizing process as they meditate on their poetic allusions or perform the traditional salat, the daily prayers that constitute one of the five pillars of Islam, the others being faith, charity, fasting, and pilgrimage to Mecca.

Textile (Textile)

Imagine How Many by Margo Wolowiec is a woven polyester depiction of blurred text and floral images found on social media, distorted beyond complete recognition. It resembles a newspaper with a conspicuous “fold” down the middle, but its contents are undoubtedly drawn from Wolowiec’s practice of image aggregation and do not follow the clear formatting newspapers normally possess. Instead, Wolowiec has created an alternative publication of sorts, drawing in a third, comparative source of “networked” imagery and information, inserting the concept of publication and social media into her greater examination of the structures governing dissemination.

Textile (Textile)

Sombras de los Valles (Shadows of the Valleys) is part of a series of works created by Bayrol Jiménez in which he is influenced by hand-painted signs and large billboards in Mexico. From small artisanal store-front insignia to widespread symbols and lettering, Jiménez looks at how this iconography shapes Mexican cultural identity. It is worth noting that the hand painted signs especially are highly unique, especially in an age of homogenised digital images and reproduced typefaces.

Textile (Textile)

Designed by the artist and fabricated in collaboration with Kashmiri artisans in India, Baseera Khan’s Psychedelic Prayer Rugs combine visual iconography traditional to Islam, such as the crescent moon and lunar calendar, with brightly coloured symbols of personal significance to the artist: a pair of embroidered sneakers, a fragment of an Urdu poem, and the Purple Heart medal. Visually seductive yet charged with political and symbolic associations, the rugs bridge elements of American popular culture with aspects of Islamic worship that may be misunderstood in contemporary secular contexts. Encouraged by Khan to take their shoes off and interact with the rugs, viewers participate in a decolonizing process as they meditate on their poetic allusions or perform the traditional salat, the daily prayers that constitute one of the five pillars of Islam, the others being faith, charity, fasting, and pilgrimage to Mecca.

Textile (Textile)

The title for this body of work, Poco se gana hilando, pero menos mirando , is based on a Spanish saying that underestimates feminized crafts or tasks, implying that it is better for a woman to be doing ‘something’, no matter how useless it is, instead of just doing nothing. This series of works by Claudia Gutiérrez Marfull features embroideries that represent the peripheral and marginalized landscapes of Puente Alto commune in Santiago, the city’s biggest district and its most southern outskirts. In 2015, when this work was produced, there was not a single health service provider, police station, pharmacy, daycare or school in the whole area of Puente Alto.

Textile (Textile)

Anonymous by Laura Lima consists of a series of fabric-based forms, over which rope has been arranged in varying textures and patterns. Visually, the work evades more complex descriptions, demanding a separate set of conventions to describe its semi-textural, semi-sculptural surface. Lima’s principle of demanding alternative descriptive conventions and exploring the experiential dimension of interacting with her work is fully visible in Anonymous , which is in many ways best qualified, in its sheer variety of shapes and textures, by its title.

Textile (Textile)

A Year · Marx by Liu Ding consists of a piece of silk onto which a poem about Marx is printed using inkjet. The work is part of the silk inkjet series A Year, which features political poems from Pine Trees on the Square , a series that Liu Ding wrote for the 2015 Istanbul Biennial. The year 2015 marked a critical political juncture for China, orchestrated by its current leadership and centered around propositions for nationalism.

Textile (Textile)

In the exhibition Pink as a Cabbage / Green as an Onion / Blue as an Orange , Asli Çavusoglu pursues her work on color to delve into an investigation into alternative agricultural systems and natural dyes made with fruits, vegetables, and plants cultivated by the farming initiatives she has been in touch with. Yet, rather than formulating the history of a particular color, the artist thinks through color, bringing together the various stories and models numerous farming initiatives in Turkey. The fabrics – each corresponding to a unique initiative – evoke the question: How have the social uprisings in Turkey during the last decade shaped the way we reimagine sites of everyday resistance?

Textile (Textile)

In the exhibition Pink as a Cabbage / Green as an Onion / Blue as an Orange , Asli Çavusoglu pursues her work on color to delve into an investigation into alternative agricultural systems and natural dyes made with fruits, vegetables, and plants cultivated by the farming initiatives she has been in touch with. Yet, rather than formulating the history of a particular color, the artist thinks through color, bringing together the various stories and models numerous farming initiatives in Turkey. The fabrics – each corresponding to a unique initiative – evoke the question: How have the social uprisings in Turkey during the last decade shaped the way we reimagine sites of everyday resistance?

Textile (Textile)

Incompatibles (Unitas) is made from discarded samples of the yarns that are exported from Croatia and not actually available in the local market. The textile industry in former Yugoslavia has essentially closed down under pressure from Indian and Chinese industries and as a result of the botched privatization of once state-owned factories. There is only one factory remaining in Zagreb producing these yarns.

Textile (Textile)

Monteverdi Ici – Deeply, Feeling Filling the World by Laure Prouvost is a tapestry that references a video by the artist entitled Monteverdi Ici (2018). Both artworks feature a woman’s naked body as a central visual element. In the video, the woman’s body is outdoors, with her back to the camera, moving her arms gently through the surrounding flowers.

Textile (Textile)

The Korean title for U: Repair the cowshed after losing the cow = Too late is —a famous Korean proverb meaning “you are doing something when you are already late to do it”. This work by Seulgi Lee is a nubi (traditional Korean quilt) blanket project that shows Korean proverbs expressed as geometric shapes. Nubi blankets were used as single sheet summer blankets in Korean households until the 1980s.

Textile (Textile)

Formed from pillowcases, each of which contains an embroidered calligraphic text as well as drawings depicting dreams, Ali Eyal’s Painting Size 80 x 60 cm is part of a long-term project which records and indexes such dreams. “I rode on my cousin’s back, laughing until the heaviness of my body weighed his to the floor. At the time I was with him on their large farm that he always dreamed of visiting.

Textile (Textile)

Out of simple materials, Alicia Henry creates enigmatic, somewhat troubled characters, which reveal her interest in the complexities and the contradictions surrounding familial relationships. The artist probes societal differences and how these variations affect individual and group responses to themes of beauty, the body, and broader issues of identity. Untitled explores these themes and addresses the processes through which women navigate such issues.

Textile (Textile)

In the exhibition Pink as a Cabbage / Green as an Onion / Blue as an Orange , Asli Çavusoglu pursues her work on color to delve into an investigation into alternative agricultural systems and natural dyes made with fruits, vegetables, and plants cultivated by the farming initiatives she has been in touch with. Yet, rather than formulating the history of a particular color, the artist thinks through color, bringing together the various stories and models numerous farming initiatives in Turkey. The fabrics – each corresponding to a unique initiative – evoke the question: How have the social uprisings in Turkey during the last decade shaped the way we reimagine sites of everyday resistance?

Textile (Textile)

In 2011, Mounira Al Solh began a series of drawings that documented her meetings and conversations with displaced Syrian refugees in Lebanon and various European countries. The oral histories she collected are very different from those told in administrative interviews or police interviews. My specialty was to make a peasants’ haircut, but they obliged me work till midnight often (2017) is part of a series of embroideries that speaks to how personal stories in this political context create collective history.

Textile (Textile)

During the years of President Senghor, Papa Ibra Tall was influential in the cultural dimension of Senegalese politics, participating in the implementation of the Dakar School, a movement of artistic renewal born at the dawn of the country’s independence between 1960 and 1974 and which was encouraged by President Senghor. The artist set out to transcribe ‘negritude’ in his works, according to Senghor’s definition in Problème de la Négritude: “To assume the values of civilization of the Black world, to actualize them and to fertilize them, if necessary with the foreign contributions, to live by oneself and for oneself, but also to make them live by and for others, thus bringing the contribution of the new Negroes to the civilization of the universal.”

Textile (Textile)

Maori barkcloth making is the central artistic form in the Pacific, and still at the core of cultural expression in many Pacific countries. However, Maori barkcloth making ceased to be practiced in the nineteenth century, at the same time as the arrival of European colonists. Completed barkcloth works often represent another complex Pacific Indigenous accomplishment, the sophisticated system of celestial mapping used in the cross-Pacific navigation that led to the expansion of a vivid pan-Pacific civilisation, thriving before colonial disruption.

Textile (Textile)

Cosmic Tautology I and II are two textile pieces representative of Santiago Borja’s practice and long-standing interest in disrupting universalist assumptions of minimalism by connecting them with other, non-Western or esoteric references. They were hand-woven in Teotitlán del Valle, Oaxaca, Mexico, and are composed of nine squares, the middle one left unwoven. Their composition is based on Red Square, White Letters (1962) by Sol Lewit, but they also take cues from works like Black Series II by Frank Stella.

Textile (Textile)

A “mata ni pachedi” is a piece of painted textile that depicts narrative images of goddesses. Traditionally, the images would be painted onto a piece of cloth found in the temple. Also known as the “kalamkari” (a hand-painted or block-printed cotton textile), “mata ni pachedi” literally translates to “behind the mother goddess”.

Textile (Textile)

Yuta Nagi Panaad (Promised Land) by Cian Dayrit addresses the impacts of the globalized economy and its powerful ideology on the spaces of everyday life. This tapestry work is a map that aims to visualize the expanding borders of mineral extraction, agri-business plantations, and their effects on the communities and the ecology of Mindanao, Philippines. Mindanao has a history of colonialism, exploitation and displacement of its people.