A show of powerful textile art in Amsterdam
The exhibition “Unravel” was first presented at the Barbican Art Gallery in London. From fall 2024 it is on view at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
Photo: Jemima Yong / Barbican Art Gallery
As you enter the lower level of Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum, Cecilia Vicuña’s largescale installation Quipu Austral greets you with a forest of earthy tones. Streams of unspun wool pour down from the ceiling to the floor, creating what the Chilean artist calls a ‘poem in space’. Here, Vicuña has harnessed the Andean quipu (“knot” in Quechua), a system of writing through knots connecting its makers to the cosmos that was banned after the Spanish conquest.
Vicuñas work is an evocative introduction to the newly opened Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles and Art, a collaborative exhibition between London’s Barbican Art Gallery where it debuted this spring, and this Netherlands institution. “Textiles are so intimately woven into our lives. We are wrapped in them when we’re born. We’re shrouded in them when we die. We use them to express ourselves every day. And now, there’s so much more space to consider textiles as fine art rather than craft,” says Amanda Pinatih, Design Curator at Stedelijk Museum.
“Looking at our collection, you see from the 1960s onward, how textiles take more 3D shapes, they come off the walls and become politically engaged. At the same time, a lot of young and contemporary artists are using the medium to address societal issues and to work through lived experiences. So, it feels timely to explore the transformative and subversive potential of this long-overlooked medium.” Unravel delivers on this premise in abundance.
“Textiles are so intimately woven into our lives. We are wrapped in them when we’re born. We’re shrouded in them when we die”
Bringing together around 100 works from 50 international artists, the expansive exhibition takes visitors on an emotional and sometimes difficult journey. You encounter many bold works that speak intemperately to power, while others whisper quietly, drawing us close to consider the labour and care that brought them into being.
From the monumental to the hand held; from the work of one to collective creations; and via a plethora of techniques both antique and futuristic; the show is a protest, a therapy session and a love-in all stitched into one.
Moving through the gallery, a series of open-ended themes spin into each other, forming an intergenerational conversation. The first theme, Subversive Stitch, unites artists who defy the idea that textiles is women’s work by reclaiming domestic techniques in order to embody liberation. Sewing, embroidery and stuffing are used as means of resistance.
Judy Chicago: „Birth Tear“, 1982
Source: Stedelijk Museum
The American artist Judy Chicago is represented with an embroidery from her “Birth Project” series (1980-1985). It uses needlepoint to depict a woman bringing life into the world, her physical agony taking on psychedelic dimensions. The artist equates the under representation of birth in Western art with the disrespect given to women’s art wrought with thread.
Borderlands takes you into the hinterlands where peoples and cultures meet. Leapfrogging over physical or cartological boundaries, these artists inhabit spaces that transgress the ‘other’. Most striking is Igshaan Adams’ delicate installation taking you along the ‘desire lines’, or informal pathways, connecting South African townships that have been historically segregated. Adamsʼ ‘Prayer clouds’ of wires, shells, beads and threads hang in the air like the dust rising from the many feet who defied the marginalisation of apartheid.
“Bearing Witness” features artists whose works commemorate the oppressed, and which hold memory and grief. Two large tapestries by Teresa Margolles honour the lost lives of Eric Garner in Staten Island and Jadeth Rosano López in Panama City. Each fabric was placed in proximity with the body and then bequeathed to groups of embroiderers from their respective communities. The results become an active repository for the loss caused their brutal murders.
“Can we heal from trauma or will there always be a scar?”
Then bringing us back from atrocity and crisis, is Wound and Repair, which examines textile making as a meditative act. Angela Su’s series Sewing Together My Sick Mind (2019-20) uses her own hair to embroider images of an eye, a breast and a vulva being stitched and punctured by a needle. Through the surgical act of suturing the artists responds to the pro-democracy riots in Hong Kong through and asks: Can we heal from trauma or will there always be a scar?
Finally, Unravel transports us to Ancestral Threads, which amasses artists who venerate their ancestors and indigenous peoples – those who have suffered most from colonial histories of extraction, displacement and erasure – to relearn ancient knowledge systems.
“People can be moved by stories of resilience, rebellion and emancipation, and be inspired to do same”
Antonio Jose Guzman and Iva Jankowicz’s Messengers of the Sun (2020) references the brilliance of the musician Sun Ra and gris gris (West African amulets) to create a series of oversized indigo cotton capes. You learn that in the 18th century one length of this cloth was worth one enslaved human; the textile trade being closely linked to the transatlantic slave trade. The artists thus reinterpret the diverse colonial history of indigo textiles.
As you prepare to exit the show, Vicuña returns to wave you goodbye with her series of ‘precarios’. These small sculptural assemblages are made from found debris and act as offerings to mother nature. As ephemeral objects, they remind us of the fragility of our natural environment and our connections to original cultures.
“We finish with this one because we hope that visitors will leave with a sense of hope and joy,” says Pinatih. “There are a lot of heavy narratives in Unravel as artists push up against existing regimes and fixed notions of power. But people can be moved by these stories of resilience, rebellion and emancipation, and be inspired to do same in their own lives.”
„Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art“, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, on view until January 5, 2025