Raisa Kabir

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.

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

NO PROTECTION 2020

 

 

No one taught me how to tell my story. You were my first teacher. But I wasn’t prepared for what was to come, you didn’t warn me.  No one whispered in my ear...

~ Can you teach me how to communicate? ~ I hold your story in my body. Several stories. That’s the only way I know how.

I remember you being fearless, when you were younger. IT was raw, IT was free. Pioneer. Power walking in your saree. Wrapping me up in your dupatta, like a seatbelt in a doorless baby taxi. 50miles an hour. Riding on the back of bicycle-vans together, loose in the air, legs swinging. We were early adventurers. Women together. All of us. Bora Khala, Shonchi Apu, Me You.

 

But you didn’t prepare me. You didn’t tell me

~I am the mother. You are the child.

You are the mother. I am the child? ~

You couldn’t have done anyway.

No one could have protected me

 

Not even you.

 

Raisa Kabir 2020

 

All photos by Tiu Makkonen

Fabric of Society - Glasgow international 2021

 

 

Fabric of society at The Deep End as part of Glasgow International til June 27th. 

My work NO PROTECTION 2020 takes on new meanings amid the pandemic and is a collective protest and call to the endemic failing to protect queer trans disabled people from harm.

I feel honoured and privileged to have created this space and exhibition with @rabiyachoudhry @_jasleen.kaur_ and @raeyensong and with production with @morvyc

This is an exhibition about family, othered cultures, imagined ancestry and the power of documenting our own families. It is about loss, hope and the transformative action to do the work on yourself towards ending cycles of intergenerational trauma. What does it mean to Mother as a verb, as an action?

This rug gun tufted piece is about disability, queerness, dysfunction and inability to process unspeakable things that were inherited trauma. This piece is about mourning all the times we were failed by those who were meant to protect us from harm. A collective voice a personal action...

I feel so empowered making this work and getting to work as a collective with Fabric of Society, four diasporic artists of colour. The exhibition and works were site specific and work as one and reference each other in a very magical way as well as standing alone. We chose to exhibit in a non hierarchical space in a non institutional space in Glasgow Southside.

Photos by Tiu Makkonen

"Gather your spools, let your hair down for me. Gently. Here. Undo." 2021 CCA Glasgow

 "Gather your spools, let your hair down for me. Gently. Here. Undo." 2021 

Raisa Kabir performs with a woven head of hair, responding to the textile geographies of labour between Kashmiri woven shawls, Paisley, Scotland, Textile Archives, and South Asian diasporic migration and displacement. A consequent reminder of the colonial imposed borders and the ongoing conflict between India and Pakistan

 

'Ambi '- CCA Glasgow  with Glasgow School of Art - opening 7th May 2021

 

Art In Manufacturing - John Spencer Textiles and British Textile Biennial

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

Performance at the Whitworth - Textile and Place conference Manchester school of art

 

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.

Textile and Place 

CONFERENCE

 

12 - 13 APRIL 2018 Manchester School of Art & the Whitworth

 

The conference hosted by Manchester School of Art and the Whitworth draws upon Manchester past histories and contemporary associations with textile linked to place.
​
Textile as a socially dynamic, communicative and active material offers a rich seam of enquiry into how textile participates and influences how we live. This conference seeks to examine how textiles connects with the idea of place in its histories, its production, sustainable future ecologies and in its narratives of migration, sociability and politics.

Textiles as materials are deeply linked to certain places, with associated specialist skills. They signify the nature of cultural identity, particularly relevant in the current socio-economic, political and global developments with Beyond Borders, an exhibition on South Asian textiles on at the Whitworth, providing context to this discussion.

Full conference programme here https://www.textileandplace.co.uk/

 

Performance part one - Making the Warp - "Your threads cut my fingers..."

project space performance from Raisa Kabir on Vimeo.

 
Performance part one - Making the Warp - "Your threads cut my fingers..."

This short video outlines the first performance of "Your threads cut my fingers...." Creating the fine, cotton warp which was then used in the second performance piece of "Your threads cut my fingers... they bleed yet again and again" at INIVA. This warp was beamed on to use on the loom, slowing drawing and unravelling the threads across the beams before being cut....  Undoing and re/doing the repetitive actions and labours of  (historically violent) textile production  in making a reflection on creativity/bodies/production and capital...

 

 

Audio of Raju Rage, Raisa Kabir and Nirmal Puwar at Stuart Hall Library

 

 

 

Clothes, Cloth and Culture Group meeting in February featured a collaboration between two young artists, Raisa Kabir and Raju Rage. They described how they use their art and textile practices to address gendered South Asian queer identity and the meanings of cotton cloth on the brown queer body. Raisa Kabir brought along examples of her woven textiles and Raju Rage dressed in a sari printed with archival photographs.

The artists worked together on the project "There is More at Stake Than Just 3 Metres of Cloth" which represents the migrations of South Asians from North India/ Panjab to East Africa to Britain and the symbolism encoded within the turban. Sociologist Nirmal Puwar offered her thoughts and questions followed by comments from the intrigued audience. 

Read more about the participants on the webpage and an audio recording of the event is available below.

 

 

 

http://stuarthalllibrary.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/audio-recordings-of-raju-rage-and-raisa.html