Raisa Kabir

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

AMBI - Center of Contemporary Art Glasgow 7th - 29th MAY

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

As part CCA Glasgow’s current exhibition, ambi, Raisa Kabir presents her new moving portrait and sculpture work responding to the textile geographies of labour between Kashmiri woven shawls, Paisley, Scotland, textile archives, and South Asian diasporic migration and displacement.  The sculptural weaving, which features in the moving portrait, acts as a consequent reminder of the colonial imposed borders and the ongoing conflict between India and Pakistan.

To view the film please visit this link https://cca-annex.net/entry/gather-your-spools-let-your-hair-down-for-me-gently-here-undo/

 

“The performance in the moving portrait is a kind of queer ‘drag’ embodying South Asian narratives projected on to the brown femme body in this way. A performed orientalised fantasy of the craft labour/er. I challenge the viewer to look at me and ask what I am doing. As this weaver doesn’t really exist in any land or geography. Like a colonial archive, the labour and craft of the weaving is divorced from the body, and place of origin, its land, the weaver, the patterns.  Like much of my work, I reveal textiles as intimately connected to the resistance of displaced peoples, and the connections made across movements, histories, british empire and ongoing occupation resulting from imperial histories. The moving portrait is set in an idea of nature, untethering the land and geography in relation to the crafted labour of Paisley designs, where the woven shawls originated in Kashmir, and the motif is found across textiles spanning the northwestern region of South Asia up into Afghanistan and Punjab. 

The body of this craft labour/er has been displaced. I, performing these weaving actions, with these materials, in this place, am creating a fantasy based on the mythology of this weaver. There is no recreation. It aims to challenge the viewer to reexamine the histories placed on, or erased around the provenance of textiles and textile patterns. How this is intimately connected to border violence and colonial borders in that region, where decimated textile heritages and continuation of hand weaving brocade shawls has declined, and how that is linked to Scottish and British interaction, and the consumption of paisley patterned cloth divorced from the Boteh.” — Raisa Kabir

The title of the exhibition, ambi, is Punjabi for the pattern known in Scotland as Paisley Pattern. ambi also means ‘both’, allowing for multiple narratives and acknowledging that these works from the archive have diverse origins and appropriations.

This exhibition, a partnership between CCA and GSA, takes works from the textiles, fashion and costume holdings at The Glasgow School of Art Archives & Collections as its starting point. The GSA has specially commissioned four Scotland and UK-based artists and designers Rabiya Choudhry, Fiona Jardine, Raisa Kabir and Hanneline Visnes. Each responds to specific textiles holdings or the archive in order to track its histories in order to present a new story or work from it.

This film work can be viewed on CCA Annex until the end of the exhibition on Saturday 29 May.

 

 

'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

' নীল. Nil. Nargis. Blue. Bring in the tide with your moon...' Indigo + Madder Gallery. Solo Exhibition

 

indigo+madder is thrilled to present Raisa Kabir’s solo exhibition নীল. Nil. Nargis. Blue. Bring in the tide with your moon…

 

Raisa’s interdisciplinary practice addresses cultural anxieties surrounding nationhood, textile identities and the cultivation of borders. Through her work, she examines the encoded violence in histories of labour in globalised neo-colonial textile production through her chosen mediums of woven text/textiles, sound, video and performance.

 

Raisa’s current work 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.


Through using weaving as a methodology for resistance, as a performative craft action in dance and diaspora, Raisa’s work re-situates the intensive labour processes of textile production to highlight the erasure of racialised and gendered labour within these connected global systems and networks.

The exhibition brings together several new and previously unseen works by Raisa. ‘Lay your heavy bones here...' after Soporte de Vasija, a backstrap textile made with indigenous Mexican cotton thread and hand spun brown cotton, features motifs inspired by the Soporte de Vasija, a vessel in the shape of vertebral columns from Oaxaca (Monte Alban II 200BC - 200AD), now in the National Museum of Anthropology, Mexico. The work, with columns interlaced into the warp and weft, draws on disability politics and material objects that are forged out of bodily labour. It explores the link between craft and exploitation and the role of the body in types of making, whether that be ceramics or textiles. Raisa highlights this role, and suggests that there is ‘an imprint left behind. A shared knowledge of a heaviness in the body. By making links between ancient makers in Mexico, the value of labour and art in museums by people of colour, the textile references the absent body or presence of the maker in crafted objects by artists of colour.’

The title of the exhibition comes from the central work নীল. Nil. Nargis. Blue. Bring in the tide with your moon…, a film installation made using footage from Raisa’s performance on the Scottish coast, where British nuclear submarine war heads are kept underwater. She used natural Bengali indigo dye, and items made from linen and jute, to weave on a backstrap loom in the sea. The performance harnessed weaving, with the unknowable depths of the sea, contrasts of violent beauty and occupied/militarized indigenous land. Through the use of natural materials such as jute, indigo and linen, the piece uncodes the historical and material connections between Scotland, Bengal and the Caribbean. The natural dye, powerfully alludes to the history of forced labour of indigo production in colonial Bengal, and the transgenerational trauma that it has inflicted in the region. Indigo farmers in nineteenth century colonial Bengal were exploited, and remained perpetually in debt, through a brutally oppressive system set up by colonial planters. In 1859, after decades of oppression and violence, the farmers started, what came to be known as the Nil Bidroha or Indigo Revolt. The history of indigo in pre-partition Bengal is also marked by the disruption of local systems of knowledge of indigo cultivation, rooted in nature, to serve an increasingly global market and enable the growth of the exploitative planter system.

The performance focuses on the complex narrative of historical trauma across generations, by intimately navigating, what Raisa describes as ‘emotional literacy and the legacies of language - rather the loss of it... asking what does it mean to be connected to our lineage when there is no language to express our emotions between generations of diaspora? The work has come out of researching indigo planter history, the aftermath of that history on the Bengali/Bangladeshi collective psyche, working on the relationship between myself and my mother, and the barriers we have in understanding each other. How there is so much trauma, she has no emotional language to be able to communicate to me, or decipher her response.’

The performance tenderly explores the watery languages of matrilineal trauma, and the attempts to find an emotional literacy, unspoken between generations and across diasporas.

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.

 

 

 

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

'Warping the borders, fringes; fractured...' Raisa Kabir video piece

 

Warping the borders, fringes; fractured... Raisa Kabir 2016 Whitworth gallery from Raisa Kabir on Vimeo.

This is a performance piece where I unravel balls of white cotton - grown and spun in India, as well as using Bangladeshi spun yarn - around a series of warping posts that map out lines of geographical borders, partitions, links, and routes of pre partition colonial India. A series of windings that then draw red yarn across sites and boundaries of India, Pakistan, Kashmir and then the creation of Bangladesh through the conflict between West Pakistan and East Pakistan, a later by product of the borders created in 1947. Mapping conflict across these plains with warping a psyche geography. The piece is set in the Whitworth Art garden and is a site specific performance installation. The warping posts are inscribed with collected information in Bengali, news paper clippings documenting unrest, and also poems and written vignettes of memories, and affect of partition related to family trauma.

The accompanying film 2017  is of myself during the performance, walking around and around these borders and outlines in the white yarn, a use of my disabled body and the ongoing labours to create the piece. I then begin to slowly add the red yarn to re trace the lines of partition or noted historical areas of violence. It is instead of making a textile cloth out of the yarns themselves, the film and moving image documents the yarn itself becoming the artwork. The warps are later peeled off the pegs, and becomes woven in it's self, tangled and sculptural. It is the labour encapsulated in the collected yarn, that becomes the symbol of energy spent and recycled labour, unwinding, re-warping, re-stepping, retracing lines of actions and cauterisations. This collected entanglement of poems, Bengali writing on the posts enmeshed within the yarn, is pulled through the Art garden, and Whitworth gallery as a cathartic action to gather these political borders and colonial trauma many South Asians carry with them in their bodies through generational memory. The wounds of partition are still felt with religious and ethnic minorities caught on either sides in on going conflicts, still today. 

"Warping the borders, fringes; fractured..." 2016

Being shown as part of Beyond Borders, Whitworth Gallery, May 2017 - June 2018

 

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...

 

 

The Politics of Cloth on South Asian Queer and Trans bodies. A collaboration between Raju Rage and Raisa Kabir

"There is More at Stake Than Just 3 metres of Cloth."

 

Communicating the transitions and migrations of turbans from North India/ Panjab via East Africa to Britain, Raisa Kabir weaving on a loom, crafting cloth conceptually created by Raju Rage, who ‘performed’ embodying this cloth, with their complex migration narratives, on their non-conforming queer-transgender body.

(weaving loom, projection, images, text, sculptural objects, soundscape, cloth)

Link to Raju Rage's artist site here, to see more of their work

 

Some details of the turban being woven...