A needle piercing the eye, the image sewn together with human hair. Another needle passes through the nipple and a third stitches the lips to silence. Human hair separated from the body could be waste – there is something disgusting and scary about hair clogging the sink – and could be a sentimental keepsake stored inside the locket. It can become a thread. You can draw or sew with it. In this work, Hong Kong artist Angela Su does both. You need to get closer and you want to get further away. He gives us something painful of himself.
Solange Pessoa’s drippy, balloon-like earthen sacs sag and bulge like intestinal bags in a hammock. Magdalena Abakanowicz’s sisal body hangs from above, cloaked and mysterious, heavy and dark as a bat suspended in a cave. A little pink woman, sewn by Louise Bourgeois, floats above her shadow and falls forever. Sometimes it’s impossible to know what we’re looking at: Xhosa artist Nicholas Hlobo’s Babelana Ngentloko (“they share a head”) draws long, tentacle-like stripes behind a bulging white skin, like something between a body part and alien underwear. pouch. You can imagine finding it in an aquarium, under a microscope, in a jar at a medical museum, or at an exotic lingerie store. Almost a painting, a relief, or a drawing but none of these, Hlobo’s work leans towards us as if aware of our presence.
Hybrid, heterodox, full of strangeness, anger, beauty and horror, Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art the Barbican is often magnificently over-the-top, at other moments quiet and private, not giving up its secrets until you linger. It is also full of stories and materiality, tenderness and violence. This great tangled knot of an exhibition connects the delicate and the extravagant, the ostentatious and the funerary, the ancestral and the quotidian.
We visit a neighborhood snack bar where Tschabalala Self evokes fast-disappearing Harlem community life, and we revisit Tracey Emin’s 1999 appliqued blanket, which celebrates her teenage trauma and her anger and resistance to her experience of being raped as a 13-year-old schoolgirl. There are scenes from traditional Romani life in Poland and the spirit world of Haitian Voudu. We swim among groupers, turtles and stingrays on Tau Lewis’s coral reef of recycled fabrics, and encounter Margarita Cabrera’s green cactuses, whose insignia are still visible, sewn by Spanish-speaking immigrants from US border patrol uniforms.
Tucked under glass and hung at right angles on the gallery wall, LJ Roberts’s small paintings depict lesbian marches and protests in the wake of a transphobic attack. We can also see the back side of these embroideries; all the accidental loose and buried threads are looped, snagged and twisted in a fortuitous recognition of the complexity and messiness of relationships. The complexities are beyond material. Sheila Hicks asked friends and relatives for their favorite clothes, then wrapped them and embellished them with colorful threads, presenting them in a display case as a pile of multicolored balls, each containing secrets and memories.
Throughout Unravel, there are moments when I am frozen, touched, and moved by the intimacies the work records. Sewing and embroidery, beading and weaving, and the quiet focus on getting the job done often require our own closeness and attention to small details. Physical closeness is often important here. José Leonilson created embroidered texts about the life of a gay man with HIV in São Paulo in the early 1990s. Time was running out, but he chose an environment that required long periods of concentration. The calmness required to do the work may well be therapeutic. These are restless affairs. Similarly, Paraguayan artist Feliciano Centurión’s embroidered mixes of text and images resemble samplers. “I am a suffering soul,” he wrote in one. “Hooray!” (“I’m alive!”) In another. Words emerge amid blooming flowers.
Then life collapses with a roar. In a tapestry by Diedrick Brackens, a black man carries another from a burning building and escapes flames exploding around them, composed of acrylic thread with latch hooks that erupt from the surface.
Sometimes we need to get closer, sometimes we are surrounded. Igshaan Adams takes us on a walk through the hinterland between two South African counties that have historically been deliberately separated. Using aerial photographs to map these zones of division and exclusion and the routes people follow between them, Adams navigates physical and spiritual intimacies and distances. Finely twisted and twisted wires and threads create drifting clouds and dust devils, adorned with swirls of beads and shells, in a kind of airborne particle soup we pass through, as if we were kicking up dust that moves back and forth between places and times. What Adams does is raise dust.
All media has its own history, and textiles go back as far as possible. However you define it, and with its more immediate definitions such as appliqué or knitting, stitching or stitching, tapestry or embroidery, weaving or quilting, the work here oscillates between one thing and the other – from nature to art, from image to object, from process to protest, from commemorative storytelling.
One room contains two plates, each lit from below, resembling a stretcher or autopsy table. Each one has a fabric filled with pictures and symbols. One has the blood of a woman assassinated in Panama City, the other has bloody handprints and commemorates the 2014 murder of Eric Garner while being arrested on Staten Island. Mexican artist Teresa Margolles created a shroud-like fabric in collaboration with a family. He is of Kuna descent, the other is at the Harlem Needle art institute. These collaborative studies question whether wounds can heal. Dealing with trauma, anger, and the possibility of healing, the medium is the perfect tool, not the message. Repairing and renewing, sewing, weaving, assembling, patching and shrouding are an integral part of textile art.
There’s almost too much to take in here. This often fascinating, sometimes touching collaboration between the Barbican and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam is one of the best and most thought-provoking I have seen on this subject. Whether you call it fiber art, textile art, high art or low art, do we really care to debate whether textiles are crafts, applied art or fine art anymore? Call it whatever you want; textiles here are often illustrated through drawing, sculpture and other means. They are also clothes, rugs, blankets, paintings and maps, totems and abstractions, repositories of history and memory. The exhibition dissolves with paints and blood, pain, pleasure, politics and history. Life and death pass through it.