Textile and Place
CONFERENCE
12 - 13 APRIL 2018
Manchester School of Art & the Whitworth |
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.
“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.
Posted at 06:01 PM in Art, Contemplative , Craft, Decolonizing, Fabric, Feminism , Film, Performance, Queer, South Asian, Textiles, Threads, woven | Permalink
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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
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
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
"The body is a site of production" 2017 (resist, resist, resist)
Weaving as a methodology, as a tool to use 'un-weaving' as a strategy to undo models of production/productivity, and re-situate the disabled body, and the racialised body so bound up with labours it cannot remove itself from. To spend 10hours weaving, building a loom, using the body as a loom, only to not produce cloth for any purpose or function. What does it mean to exist in this world and feel like your gender is unfunction, how trauma disables the body; the same body is a living archive, a geography of pain and trigger points. The body is a site of production. Resist resist resist.
Photo credits Julian Lister
Posted at 06:32 PM in Art, Contemplative , disability, Documentation, Performance, Photography, Queer, residency, South Asian, Textiles, Threads, woven | Permalink