|
|
Photo credits- Marlo Mortimer, and Raisa Kabir
|
|
Photo credits- Marlo Mortimer, and Raisa Kabir
Posted at 04:38 PM in Art, Craft, disability, Documentary, Documentation, Exhibition, Film, Performance, Photography, Queer, Reflection, sexuality, Textiles, Threads, woven | Permalink
"Gather your spools, let your hair down for me. Gently. Here. Undo." 2021
Posted at 07:42 PM in Conversation, Craft, Decolonizing, Design, South Asian, Textiles, Threads, woven | Permalink
View the full exhibition and film here https://indigoplusmadder.com/london-art-exhibitions/2018/10/27/raisakabir-2pnpn
Raisa Kabir (b. 1989) is an interdisciplinary artist and weaver, who utilises woven text/textiles, sound, video and performance to translate and visualise concepts concerning the politics of cloth, labour and embodied geographies. Her (un)weaving performances comment on power, production, disability and the body as a living archive of collective trauma.
Kabir has participated in residencies and exhibited work internationally at The Whitworth, The Tetley, Raven Row, Cove Park, Textile Arts Center NYC, and the Center for Craft Creativity and Design U.S. Kabir has lectured on South Asian textile cultures at Tate Modern, Institute of Contemporary Art London, London College of Fashion, The Courtauld, Royal College of Art, Manchester School of Art and Edinburgh College of Art.
Posted at 12:39 PM in Art, Contemplative , Craft, Decolonizing, Documentation, Exhibition, Fibre, Film, Performance, South Asian, Textiles, Threads, woven | Permalink
Materialising gendered archives: weaving, language, and the global textile object
Raisa Kabir talks through her practice as a textile and performance artist, and the political potential of craft to uncover global histories of labour, heritage and belonging. Her research explores the role of embodied geographies in textile production, and heritage economies of craft in South Asia.
From a series of digital commissions derived from my research and lectures on decolonial textile history.
https://altcph.dk/event/materialising-gendered-archives-weaving-language-and-the-global-textile-object/
Posted at 01:23 PM in Art, Contemplative , Craft, Decolonizing, Design, Fibre, Performance, research, South Asian, Textiles, Threads, woven | Permalink
1 February 2020
2pm — 6pm, Outside the Auditorium, India Art Fair Grounds
নীল. Nil. Nargis. Blue. Bring in the Tide With Your Moon is a durational performance which will see Raisa Kabir dye linen and jute in natural indigo which is native to India. Making references to the historical connections between India and Scotland, the performance will shed light on the anxieties around globalised neo-colonial textile production and nationhood.
Raisa Kabir is an interdisciplinary artist, who utilises woven textiles, sound, video and performance to translate and visualise concepts concerning the politics of cloth, labour and embodied geographies. She addresses cultural anxieties surrounding nationhood, textile identities and the cultivation of borders; as well as examining the encoded violence in histories of labour in globalised neo-colonial textile production. Her weaving performances comment on power, production, disability and the body as a living archive of collective trauma. Kabir has participated in residencies and exhibited work internationally at The Whitworth, The Tetley, Raven Row, Cove Park, Textile Arts Center NYC, and the Center for Craft Creativity and Design U.S. Kabir has lectured on her research on South Asian textile cultures at Tate Modern, Institute of Contemporary Art London, London College of Fashion, The Courtauld, Royal College of Art, Manchester School of Art and Edinburgh College of Art.
Posted at 09:46 AM in Art, Bangladesh, Craft, Decolonizing, Documentary, Exhibition, Fabric, Feminism , Film, Performance, Photography, residency, South Asian, Textiles, Threads, woven | Permalink
Textiles are interwoven throughout the cultural history of Lancashire, and for the whole of Oct 2019 I've been in residence with Queen Street Mill Textile Museum for the duration of the British Textile Biennial 2019 in Lancashire Burnley. This where I performed a small installation - 'Treadle Softly. Binding Her Braids Tightly" I have been doing archival research at Queen Street Mill Museum, where they hold the British Archive of Industrial Textiles Manufacturing.
For the rest of the Art in Manufacturing 2020 commission I have been in residency with industrial manufacturer John Spencer Textiles/Ian Mankin - a contemporary industrial weaving mill. This is part of the Art in Manufacturing residency, which places artists within industrial spaces of making to then culminate their research at Festival of Making in Blackburn in June 2020.
This residency has taken me to Gawthorpe Hall's global textile collection, Queen Street Mill's local heritage site, and John Spencer's innovative, and highly technical contemporary industrial weaving mill, which creates fabrics for designers all over the world.
Queen Street Mill Textile Museum
Posted at 06:39 PM in Art, Conversation, Craft, Design, Documentation, Exhibition, Fabric, Fibre, Performance | Permalink
Documentation of my performance at @cove_park "নীল. Nil. Nargis. Blue. Bring in the tide with your moon..." 2019 filmed and photos by @anniecrabcake @jenstillhere @ashantisharda @emilixbeatriz
This work harnessed weaving with the unknowable depths of the sea, contrasts of violent beauty and occupied/militarized indigenous land. History of forced labour of Indigo production in Bengal. The watery languages of matrilineal trauma and trying to find an emotional literacy unspoken between generations and across diasporas.
Posted at 10:36 AM | Permalink
Cove Park Craft and Design Residency Summer Programme 2019 https://covepark.org/artists/raisa-kabir/
Raisa Kabir is an interdisciplinary artist and weaver, who utilises woven text/textiles, sound, video and performance to translate and visualise concepts concerning the politics of cloth, labour and embodied geographies. She addresses cultural anxieties surrounding nationhood, textile identities and the cultivation of borders; as well as examining the encoded violence in histories of labour in globalised neo-colonial textile production. Her (un)weaving performances comment on power, production, disability and the body as a living archive of collective trauma. Her practice currently looks at the weaving processes of gesture, repetition, tension and production. In particular how there is always a need for tension in order to enable production, and how might a weaving/healing/embodied practice ultimately resist those ideas of bodily production in a capitalist system that relies on ‘functioning’ bodies and disregards others. Gendered bodies. Racialised bodies. Disabled bodies. Queer bodies. Undocumented bodies. Weaving as a methodology for resistance.
She has participated in residencies and exhibited work at The Whitworth, The Tetley, Raven Row, Textile Arts Center NYC, and the Center for Craft Creativity and Design U.S.
In 2018 I devised a performance for the Whitworth Gallery in Manchester.
‘Build me a loom off of your back and your stomach... is a performance of durational
dance, distance and diaspora. The artist
Raisa Kabir weaves and dances, carrying
the lengths of cloth-making labour
throughout the gallery space. A visualisation
of dislocated geographies, the weight of ongoing trauma, and their ghosts.’
It was a performance born out of responding to the histories of Partition 1947 of South Asia, which cut across the new international borders of Pakistan and India, and later creation of Bangladesh. The piece aimed to draw resonances between migrant labour, the exodus of many South Asian’s from poorer regions, and the histories of textile production and craft/industrial labour from Bangladesh, India and Pakistan. Linking contemporary narratives of post colonial mobility and the colonial trade in textile labour, production and resources under British Empire.
The piece used the labour of textile making processes and the visual technology of a weaving floor loom, and brought this object of racialised craft labour into the institutional space of the gallery.
It used the placing of my own brown body, as a living archive, to tap into the violent displacement and movement of peoples during partition, and their resonant ghosts, to become present within the performance. It interlaced the acts of weaving and dance, tethered to the brown body - mine -through a performance that acts as an invocation of these ghosts. It restates and re-situates that mining of labour from brown bodies, and racialised craft work, to the accrued wealth from exploits of empire.
The act of weaving on the loom in the gallery, carrying it tied to my own body, through the gallery space, dancing with it, pulling it across the distance of the space, evoked the knowledges carried by diaspora peoples, through the movement of dance, the weighted down feet, and distances travelled.
After dancing with the loom, I settled down to weave on the floor, upon a small prayer mat, and invited the audience to come closer and sit with me whilst I began to build a loom between the soles of my feet. Stitching into the soles with a needle, passing thread between the soles of my feet I created a small loom, held in tension through by body, my body becoming a loom, a space of production, a tiny corporeal archive, held in the space between my feet. this small weaving was completed then woven itself into the larger woven piece on the wooden floor loom. Weaving in the dance into the tiny loom, and re-weaving that itself into the un/woven sculpture of the floor loom.
The performance drew resonances between the migrant labourer exodus of many South Asians after 1947 partition, and the histories of textile production and craft/industrial labour from Bangladesh, India and Pakistan and Britain.
It interlaced the acts of weaving and dance, tethered to the brown body through a performance that acts as an invocation of these ghosts. It restates and re-situates that mining of labour from brown bodies, and racialised craft work, to the accrued wealth from exploits of empire.
It also attempted to root these immaterial ghosts, trans nationally, through Diaspora, the violence within colonial intuitions of gallery spaces, as places, where diaspora history is directly linked, to the labour of colonised peoples, and subsequent wealth residing in the spaces of textile production and history of Manchester.
Stitching into my feet with a needle, passing thread between the soles of my feet I created a small loom, held in tension through by body, my body becoming a loom, a space of performative disruption.
Raisa Kabir
Performance documented and all photos by Angela Dennis
Posted at 01:44 PM in Art, Bangladesh, Contemplative , Decolonizing, disability, Documentation, Exhibition, Performance, Queer, South Asian, Textiles, Threads, woven | Permalink
RAISA KABIR is an interdisciplinary artist, who utilises woven text/textiles, sound, video and performance to translate and visualise concepts concerning the politics of cloth, labour and embodied geographies. She addresses cultural anxieties surrounding nationhood, textile identities and the cultivation of borders; as well as examining the encoded violence in histories of labour in globalised neo-colonial textile production. Her (un)weaving performances comment on power, production, and the body as a living archive of collective trauma. She has participated in residencies and exhibited work at The Whitworth, The Tetley, Raven Row, Textile Arts Center NYC, and The Center of Craft Creativity and Design NC.
PERFORMANCE BY RAISA KABIR
at the Whitworth
from 18:30 - Free entry
Build me a loom off of your back and your stomach
'Build me a loom off of your back and your stomach... is a performance of durational
dance, distance and diaspora. The artist
Raisa Kabir weaves and dances, carrying
the lengths of cloth-making labour
throughout the gallery space. A visualisation
of dislocated geographies, the weight of ongoing trauma, and their ghosts.
12 - 13 APRIL 2018
Manchester School of Art & the Whitworth |
Posted at 10:49 AM in Art, Bangladesh, Contemplative , Conversation, Decolonizing, disability, embroidery, Exhibition, Performance, Photography, Pricked, Queer, South Asian, Textiles, Threads, woven | Permalink