Textile and Place
CONFERENCE
12 - 13 APRIL 2018
Manchester School of Art & the Whitworth |
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
Posted at 01:15 PM in Art, Contemplative , Conversation, Craft, disability, embroidery, Exhibition, Fabric, Fibre, Queer, research, South Asian, Textiles, Threads, woven | Permalink
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
Posted at 12:16 PM in Art, Contemplative , Conversation, Craft, disability, Documentation, Exhibition, Fabric, Feminism , Fibre, Queer, South Asian, Textiles, Threads | Permalink
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
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
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 disciplines2011
Posted at 11:22 AM in Art, Contemplative , Drawing, Exhibition, Queer, Reflection, woven | Permalink
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
Posted at 12:58 PM in Contemplative , Conversation, Decoding dress, Decolonizing, Queer, Reflection, sexuality, South Asian, Threads, woven | Permalink