by A needle piercing an eye, the image stitched with human hair. Another needle through a nipple and a third sewing up the lips to silence them. Separated from the body, human hair can be lost – there’s something terrible and terrible about hair knocking over a sink – and can become a sentimental memento kept in a locket. It can be a thread. You can draw with it or sew with it. In this work, Hong Kong artist Angela Su does both. You need to be close and you want to step away. She is giving us something of herself that is full of pain.
Clay sacks and bulge as gut bags in a hammock, drop bags, Solange Pessoa balloons. The sisal body of Magdalena Abakanowicz hangs from above, as heavy and dark and as cloaked and mysterious as a bat hanging in a cave. Little pink stitched woman, by Louise Bourgeois, floating above her shadow, falling forever. Sometimes it’s impossible to know what we’re looking at: like something between body parts and exotic underwear, Xhosa artist Nicholas Hlobo’s Babelana Ngentelko (“they share a head”) traces long tentacle-like ribbons behind bulging white leather. puka. You could imagine this in an aquarium, under a microscope, in a jar in a medical museum or in an exotic lingerie store. Almost painting or relief or drawing, but completely without any of these things, Hlobo’s work turns towards us, as if we are aware of our presence.
Hybrid, heterozygous, full of strangeness and anger and beauty and horror, Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art at the Barbican is often gorgeously excessively, at other moments quiet and private, not giving up its secrets until you linger. It is also filled with stories and relevance, tenderness and violence. This wonderful knot of display connects the delicate and the weightless, the flamboyant and the funeral, the ancestral and the everyday.
We visit a neighborhood bodega in Tschabalala Self’s evocation of Harlem’s rapidly disappearing community life, and revisit Tracey Emin’s teenage trauma, in a 1999 appliquéd rug that celebrates her anger and resistance to her experience of being raped as 13 year old schoolgirl. There are scenes of the traditional life of the Roma in Poland, and the spirit life of Haitian Voudu. We swim among the groupers and turtles and rays on the Tau Lewis coral reef of recycled fabrics, and come across Margarita Cabrera’s green cacti, sewn from a US border patrol uniform, the badge still visible, by Spanish-speaking immigrants.
Sandwiched under glass and hanging at right angles to the gallery wall, LJ Roberts’ small images depict fence parades and protests after a transphobic attack. We can also see behind this embroidery, all the incidental loose and buried threads bending and spinning and twisting in a sort of contingent recognition of the complexity and messiness of relationships. The complexities are more than matter. Sheila Hicks asked friends and relatives for their favorite pieces of clothing, which she then folded and decorated with colored threads, presented as a pile of colorful balls in a vine, each one enclosing secrets and memories .
Throughout Unravel there are moments when the relatives recorded in the work have my confusion, touch and feeling. Sewing and embroidery and beading and weaving and the quiet focus that goes into finishing the work often call for our own closeness and our attention to the small details. Physical intimacy is often important here. José Leonilson made embroidered texts about life as a lonely man with HIV in São Paulo in the early 1990s. Time was running out, but he chose a medium that required long periods of concentration. The calm needed to do the work may have been therapeutic. These are unsatisfactory works. Similarly, the samplers look like Paraguayan artist Feliciano Centurión’s text and image embroidery mixes. “I’m in pain,” he wrote in one. “Well done!” (“I am alive!”) in another. The words become among blooming flowers.
Then life crashes in with a roar. In a tapestry by Diedrick Brackens, a black man carries another man from a burning building, escaping the flames exploding around them in flaming, lattice-hooked tendrils of acrylic yarn that burst from the surface.
Sometimes we have to get close and sometimes we are surrounded. Igshaan Adams takes us on a walk through the hinterland between two South African townships that were, historically, deliberately segregated. Using aerial photographs to map the purposes of these divisions and exclusions, and the paths people take between them, Adams navigates physical and spiritual proximities and distances. Narrow and twisted narrow wires and threads create clouds and dust devils, spanned with vortices of beads and shells, in a sort of airborne particle soup that we walk through, as if we are kicking up dust going between places and times. All Adams does is kick up dust.
Every medium has its history, and textiles go back as far as possible. However you define it, and with its closer definitions such as appliqué or knitting, sewing or sewing, tapestry or embroidery, weaving or quilting, the work here goes between one thing and another – from nature to manufacture, from image to the object, from the process to the protest. , storytelling for memories.
Two slabs sit in a room, each like a bier or an autopsy table, lit from below. On each is a textile, filled with images and symbols. One is stained with the blood of a woman killed in Panama City, the other has a bloody handprint commemorating the killing of Eric Garner while he was being held on Staten Island in 2014. Mexican artist Teresa Margolles made one textile similar to a wrap in cooperation with family. descended from Kuna, the other with the arts institution Harlem Needle. These communal works ask whether wounds can ever be healed. Dealing with trauma, anger and the possibility of healing, the medium is not the message, but the whole vehicle. Repair and renewal, sewing and weaving and binding, patching and covering, are central to the textile art.
There is almost too much to pick out here. This often exciting collaboration between the Barbican and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam is one of the best and most exciting I have seen on the subject. Call it fiber art or textile art, call it high or low art, is it our job to argue more about whether textiles are craft, applied art or fine art? Add what you like – textiles here are often drawing and sculpting and painting in other ways. They are also clothes and rugs and blankets, pictures and maps, totems and abstractions, repositories of history and memory. The exhibition resolves with dyes and blood, pain, pleasure, politics and history. Life and death run through it.
