Raisa Kabir

Antibodies - Fort Aguad - Goa 2023 - with HH Spaces x The Tetley - The British Council

 

 

March 2023

Utterances - Liverpool Biennial 2023 - Bluecoat Gallery

 

 

 

 

Craft Council London - Cotton : Labour Land and Body

 

Cotton: labour, land and body

Through textiles, films and works on paper, this free to attend exhibition explored how one of the world's most ubiquitous materials has shaped the relationship between Britain and South Asia.

You can watch the four talks from our symposium, Stories of Cotton, here

For thousands of years, cotton has been skilfully cultivated from seed to yarn and crafted into garments to support a growing expansion of trade and consumption. Today, cotton remains one of the most profitable crops in the world, yet the stories and histories that it holds are rarely told.

In this exhibition, visitors were taken on an expedition across time, geographies, cultures and traditions, uncovering multi-generational connections between Britain and South Asia through the cotton industry in Lancashire. Featuring work by artists Raisa Kabir, Brigid McLeer, Bharti Parmar and Reetu Sattar commissioned by the British Textile Biennial 2021, it captures the impact of cotton production on labour, land and the body. 

Journey through punched khadi paper (a paper made from 100% cotton rag) – echoing Gandhi’s campaign to end British rule – to coded Bengali script and job titles of production-line workers captured in handwoven and jacquard textiles.

Cotton: labour, land and body is curated by Uthra Rajgopal. 21st Sept 2022 - 4th March 2023

Supported by the Bagri Foundation. In partnership with The Super Slow Way, the British Textile Biennial and the National Festival of Making.

 

 

 

 

 

House Made of Tin (a socially distanced weaving performance) Raisa Kabir

 

House Made of Tin (a socially distanced weaving performance), Raisa Kabir from Ford Foundation Gallery on Vimeo.

 

Indisposable: Tactics for Care and Mourning - Ford Foundation Gallery - New York

Indisposable: Tactics for Care and Mourning

1 OCTOBER – 10 DECEMBER 2022

https://www.fordfoundation.org/about/the-ford-foundation-center-for-social-justice/ford-foundation-gallery/exhibitions/indisposable-tactics-for-care-and-mourning/

Indisposable: Tactics for Care and Mourning is the follow-up to Indisposable: Structures of Support after the Americans with Disabilities Act, a three-year collaboration with more than thirty artists and scholars that emerged as eight online chapters each addressing the urgent questions of the moment where COVID-19 pandemic and demands for racial justice laid bare that some lives – especially disabled, queer, Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) – are deemed disposable. These chapters serve as a unique archive of the ways in which artists and scholars responded to the intertwined histories of ableism and racism, delving into the profound questions of what makes our lives livable? How do we afford our own existence and what happens when we cannot? Who creates the means by which we survive; or, were we ever meant to survive? Where are we seen as disposable, and why?

Indisposable: Tactics for Care and Mourning extends these conversations and questions by focusing on two topics critical to all eight chapters: care and mourning. The artists of Indisposable address the difficult work of not just how to care and to mourn for those deemed disposable but how to activate that work into tactics for insisting on our indisposability.

The artists in the exhibition are committed to resisting the oppressive ideologies of bodily productivity and “normalcy” that have been used as markers of human worth. Their work offers audiences the chance to consider new tactics for care and mourning, activist strategies emerging from within and uplifting communities living in precarity.

 

A collection of practice

"Gather your spools. Let your hair down for me. Gently. Here. Undo." 2021 Glasgow Centre for Contemporary Art

"Treadle softly. Tightening your warp. Weaving our weft. Binding her braids tightly..." 2019

"Build me a loom off of your back and your stomach..." Whitworth Gallery 2018

Jute  and Flax 2020 from Nil Nargis Blue Solo show 2020 Indigo + Madder London

Detail - "The body is a site of production... Resist! Resist! Resist!" 2017 The Tetley 

Detail from film performance ""Gather your spools. Let your hair down for me. Gently. Here. Undo." 2021

Still from "Nil Nargis Blue. Bring in the tide with your moon..." 2019 Cove Park

 

 

 

"Amar Desh....আমার দেশ. My country. My home. My land. My diaspora. My Motherland is a memory of unwoven dreams..."

Weaving detail 2017

"It must be nice to fall in love" 2017

 

 

 

 

The Art and Language of Weaving Resistance

 

Art in Manufacturing Residency film Queen Street Mill & John Spencer Textiles

 

 

 

 

British Textile Biennial 2021 - Art in Manufacturing Commission - RESISTANCES

 

 

RAISA KABIR from Wash Studio on Vimeo.

Detail of 'বুনন-শিল্প প্রতিরোধ ভাষা'

'The art and language of weaving resistance' 2021

A piece about the language of weaving, between border lands and the resistance of textiles in sites of conflict. Responding to the archives of John Forbes Watsons books: 'The Textile Manufactures of India' 1866, and creating a pattern of weaves that speaks back to the colonial archive. To all the textiles that were cut into fragments and sent around Britain to be subsumed into Britsh textile manufacturing and design education, this piece stays uncut. The colours evoke the boundaries and borders of saris and every combination was an imagining of the textiles I remember encountering in South Asian dress and textiles. And invoking the student textile weavings found in the archive at the Lanchashire textile industry archives.

The textile prints of the archives presented name Kashmir, Punjab, Sylhet, Herat, Lahore, Calcutta, Dhaka. Places that map the border lands that define partition in 1947, where colonial borders were created and exist to separate people in the name of nationhood. But many textile techniques of these places ares shared and are used across those sites of borderlands. The language of textiles crossing borders, shared culture and history.

The places affected by partition created large diasporas, where people had to leave and were invited to work in the British textile industry in East Lancashire. Where many communities have built their lives and families here since. Partition exists here today. We are part of these borders that do not only exist geographically but internally are reinforced and reinscribed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

House Made of Tin (A socially distanced weaving performance) 2020 - Film stills