‘Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art’ at the Barbican
Textiles have been trivialised too often, limited to the domestic sphere in their narration. Textiles are not quiet, timid, or indifferent to their rich cultural histories. They are sewn, weaved, and woven with a loaded potential, a history that witnesses international and intergenerational exchange. History is a cloth, specifically a patchwork of multiple narrators who start their work at different times, locals, and societies, responding to the topical forms of its creator’s individualised narratives. While these fluctuations in the historical narrative create uncertainty about their honesty, there is an innate truth to textiles that dictates that whichever way they are strung, knotted, warped, or weft, textiles cannot falsely fabricate their cultural weight. Unravel has been a long time coming, with textiles often being written out of the art historical narrative despite their persistent cultural and political relevancy. Arranged in a series of thematic dialogues, the exhibition examines works from the 1960s to the present day. These themes are ‘Subversive Stitch,’ ‘Fabric of Everyday Life,’ ‘Borderlands,’ ‘Bearing Witness,’ ‘Wound and Repair,’ and ‘Ancestral Threads.