• Textiles are woven into our daily lives; from the day we’re born, until the day we pass away they intimately wrap our bodies and surround us in our close environments. Because of their universality, textiles are powerful communicators of personal stories and wider socio-political narratives. Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art, a co-curation of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Barbican in London, explores the political potential of textiles in contemporary art and unpacks how textiles question, unravel and reimagine the world we live in. From Pacita Abad, Magdalena Abakanowicz, Louise Bourgeois, Judy Chicago to Jeffery Gibson, Teresa Margolles, Cecilia Vicuña, Faith Ringgold and Kimsooja, artists convey the medium’s compelling force for both resistance and repair.

• Although the medium historically has been undervalued within hierarchies of Western art history; stitching, knotting, weaving and braiding have become more and more present in artistic practices for subversive ends since the 1960’s. For decades textiles have been seen as ‘craft’ as antithesis of ‘fine art’, considered feminine and marginalised by the art world. The artists in our exhibition contest these categorisations, using the medium to speak powerfully against hierarchies. They draw on its material history to unravel concepts relating to gender, sexual expression, labour, value, ancestral knowledge, and histories of oppression and extraction. The exhibition presents intergenerational and transnational dialogues between artists to explore how they embrace textiles to critique regimes of power or honour their ancestors and celebrate their communities.

• One of these dialogues refers to what scholar Gloria E. Anzaldúa calls a ‘borderland’; ‘a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary’. They are spaces where two or more cultures meet, where different social classes encounter each other, where people of different races inhabit the same locales.[1] Having spent a childhood on the move and in proximity to the dangerous border of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) in Korea, Kimsooja calls on to the notion of boundaries and border crossings in her work, especially with her bottari. Kimsooja’s bottaris evoke the idea of people who are on the move because of migration or displacement; demonstrating an ‘undetermined place’. Questioning what we can bring with us when we have to leave a certain place and where we can find a safe space to unbundle our lives, they trace lived experiences of movement and memory.[2]

—Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art is co-curated by the Barbican, London (13 Feb - 26 May 2024) and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (14 Sep 2024 - 5 Jan 2025).