Raisa Kabir

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.

 

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

'House Made of Tin' (a socially distanced weaving performance) 2020 Ford Foundation Gallery NYC

 

 

 

 

Indisposable: Structures of Support After the ADA Chapter 4: Raisa Kabir: House Made of Tin (a socially distanced weaving performance)

Raisa Kabir critically examines how global structures of production create a hierarchy in which value and care are assigned to laborers that can adhere to eugenic and capitalist expectations of “useful” and “functioning” bodies. Kabir uses textile production in their work to alternately cite these structures and reclaims their output as allegory for, in Kabir’s words, “the ways in which marginalized communities rely – and have always relied – on support networks of care and structures of mutual aid to survive that are separate to the state.” In their woven sculptures, the intertwined threads of weaving signify the interdependent care on which disability depends. These interrelationships, made visible, perform a disability aesthetic that resists commodification and individuation. Through an open call, Kabir organized and documented a public weaving performance in October 2020 created, by, for, and from BIPOC, disabled, and queer participants. The result was a geometric textile sculpture created through interdependent action and care. Kabir used the documentation from the performance to create this new film, House Made of Tin (A Socially Distanced Weaving Performance). The visible face masks and physical distance between participants underscores the urgency and precarious nature of support structures during a time of pandemic. By embodying these structures of support and mutual aid, this performance asks us to consider how labor and care are connected across all bodies and borders. In doing so, House Made of Tin (A Socially Distanced Weaving Performance) underscores a key precept of disability justice that, in Kabir’s words, “is dependent on wider society believing in, and participating in, creating access for all.” The screening will be followed by a conversation with artists melannie monoceros and Raju Rage to discuss crafting resilience, trans care, crip kinship and chronic illness.   LINK TO EVENT   Date And Time Fri, April 30, 2021 6:00 PM – 7:30 PM BST

 

Photo credits- Marlo Mortimer, and Raisa Kabir

Indian Art Fair 2020 - Indigo, Jute, Linen

Raisa Kabir: নীল. Nil. Nargis. Blue. Bring in the Tide With Your Moon

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.

https://indiaartfair.in/programme/raisa-kabir-%E0%A6%A8%E0%A7%80%E0%A6%B2-nil-nargis-blue-bring-in-the-tide-with-your-moon