Raisa Kabir

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

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

'Build me a loom off of your back and your stomach...' Weaving Performance

 

 

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 

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/

 

"The Body is a Site of Production" - BODYWORKSHOP residency at The Tetley 2017

 

 

 

"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 

Paragraphs and Borders

Download and Listen here: Sound installation piece created by XANA for Paragraphs and Borders

Shown at Arcadia Missa Gallery - Asymmetric Grief - Curated by Binghao Wong. July 2015

Paragraphs and Borders conceptually stems from reading textiles as texts, and the transmission of language. The piece is a photograph of a handwoven piece of cotton cloth, stretched, compressed and zoomed in digitally until it is visually not recognisable as a textile any longer but resembles an abstract print. A distance is created between the intensive labour processes that had been produced to create the hand woven cloth, and the viewer. To reimagine a cloth imbued with the expected labours of a South Asian textile artist and manipulate the medium to throw it out of context, as commentary of the continued cycle of globalised racialised labour expected to continually meet demands of the consumer, or viewer. An unreadable text(ile) that re contextualises how the textile can be read. The piece is rooted in examining exhaustion, art production as labour, and the very physical labour of hand weaving and it's relationship to my disabled (queer brown) body. The labour processes are distilled into a sound piece instead to convey not the final piece of cloth, but the vast labours needed to produce and fashion a fine woven cotton fabric.

XANA http://xa-na.com/ Sound Artist based in London. We collaborated together to create a layered sound piece taken from the abstracted sounds of the labour involved in weaving a handloom woven cloth.

 

"The literary roots of postcolonial studies mean that debates about voice and, crucially, voicelessness, are familiar concerns. But it may be worth asking if it is fair to ‘read’ the textile in the same way that we might treat a piece of postcolonial literature. On the one hand, text and textile share numerous linguistic connections. It has, for example, been noted by scholars that the root of the word ‘text’ is shared with ‘textile’, essentially ‘to weave’.

 

 The construction of texts share similarities with that of the textile. By this I mean the building up of small increments (words, threads) into a larger whole (sentences, paragraphs, cloth). As a result, there is a structural familiarity between the two disciplines that has been explored by scholars who observe that the knowledge of one discipline may then be transferred to another. "

 

Post colonial Textiles – Negotiating Dialogue – Jessica Hemmings
Cross/Cultures: postcolonial studies across the disciplines

2011

 

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

Clothes, Cloth & Culture Group

 

19 Feb 2015

Stuart Hall Library Clothes, Cloth & Culture Group

The politics of cloth as a tool of resistance, and the queer brown body. 
Join us on Thursday 19 February 6:30 - 8:30pm to hear artists Raisa Kabir and Raju Rage and sociologist Nirmal Puwar.

 

Two young artists, Raisa Kabir and Raju Rage, use their art/textile practice to address the violences of colonialism, gendered South Asian queer identity, and the meanings of cotton cloth on the brown queer body. They use cloth as a decolonising tool of resistance and metaphor. Sociologist Nirmal Puwar will respond to their presentations.

"There is More at Stake Than Just 3 Metres of Cloth" A cloth to be worn as a turban, conceptually conceived by Raju Rage, was collaborativly designed and hand woven by Raisa Kabir. Exemplifying the migrations of South Asians from North India/Panjab to East Africa to Britain, and the symbolism encoded within the turban. It signified a visual recording of this complex migration history, the colours which begin brightly coloured as worn in India, are symbolic of the transition of culture, as they migrated again and again, in order to survive the racism, and violences of living in the Diaspora, the colours sobering until the cloth is rendered plain black. The final woven turban was then used in a performance piece by Raju Rage who wore the cloth on their non binary body, reiterating the struggles of having to define gender, culture, race, ethnicity and sexuality in the Diaspora.

"Your threads cut my fingers, they bleed yet again and again"
A part live "woven" art piece evoking violence in the history cotton cloth production, and the resistance of the queer brown body. Focusing on racialised labour, migration of textile workers, and the Bengali Diaspora, the work re-links the geographies of the cotton towns Oldham and Dhaka. Raisa looks at the extreme labour processes of hand weaving as a metaphor for the racialised queer body, and the histories carried in cloth/the body.

Raisa Kabir is multi-disciplinary artist, weaver and writer, who uses contemporary textiles, sound and photography to interrogate, and question concepts around the politics of dress in connection to space, gender, race, and sexuality.

Trained as a weaver at Chelsea College of Art, she utilises the embedded histories of cloth, to comment on the compacted social histories that are encapsulated within material culture. She has written about South Asian queer dress identity and culture, queer femme of colour invisibility, as well as cultural appropriation, ethnicity, diaspora and dress. 

Raju Rage is an interdisciplinary artist, creative-critical writer and community organiser who is proactive about carving space, self-representation and self-empowerment using art and activism to forge creative survival.

Working in live art, Raju focuses on de-con-structive techniques of resistance such as interruption, confusion, disturbance and anti-performance, primarily using embodiment and working with assemblages of sculpture and multi-formulations of unspoken narratives. Raju Rage's current project 'The Dilemma of the Diaspora to Define' examines the tensions and conflicts of negotiating complex diasporic identity using culturally coded sculptural objects such as cloth. 

Nirmal Puwar is a senior lecturer in Sociology at Goldsmith's College, University of London. As a leading sociologist she looks at issues of race, gender, space and body. She is the Director of Methods Lab, which initiates a series of projects at the intersection of academia and other public, as well as private, realms.

http://www.iniva.org/library/news/clothes_cloth_amp_culture_group_feb_2015

“Your threads cut my fingers, they bleed yet again and again”

 

“Your threads cut my fingers, they bleed yet again and again”

A part live “woven” art piece, that re-invokes the histories and threads of violence encoded within cotton cloth production, and the resistance of the queer brown body. Focusing on the performance of racialised labour, migration of textile workers, and the Bengali Diaspora, the work re links the geographies of Oldham in Lancsashire and Dhaka, Bangladesh; two historic towns that were built on the production of cotton cloth.

Dhaka witnessed the colonisation of India by the British from the 18th Century, and the co-opting of the skilled weavers there to export cotton to England, known to produce the finest muslin cottons available.

This link is later re-routed when immigrants, who left Bangladesh during the 1971 war, arrive in the UK and ended up working in the Textile factories in the North of England, in mill towns in Lancashire like Oldham, who once during the height of the industrial revolution, proudly out produced and undercut the hand weavers of Bangladesh and India. When Bengal was divided during the partition, people used cotton cloth as signs of nationalism, and resistance to Bangladesh being torn apart.

The work uses reclaimed spools from disused Lancashire factories, and unravels the spools of thread, which have been spun from cotton in South Asia, to create a woven installation using parts of a hand loom. The work is a retracing of the repeated use of racialised labour and it’s connection to cotton cloth, and hinting at the violence that permeates this innocuous looking material. Taking a look at the how cloth is inextricably linked to resistance, the brown body, colonialism and capitalism, and how the effects are still dictating working people’s lives today.

   

Performance took place at INIVA gallery as part of their Contemporary Rites Live Art programme of Emerging practices. Photos courtesy of Christa Holka.

  

  

  

  

 

  

 

 Photos by Christa Holka