Raisa Kabir

Craft Council London - Cotton : Labour Land and Body

 

Cotton: labour, land and body

Through textiles, films and works on paper, this free to attend exhibition explored how one of the world's most ubiquitous materials has shaped the relationship between Britain and South Asia.

You can watch the four talks from our symposium, Stories of Cotton, here

For thousands of years, cotton has been skilfully cultivated from seed to yarn and crafted into garments to support a growing expansion of trade and consumption. Today, cotton remains one of the most profitable crops in the world, yet the stories and histories that it holds are rarely told.

In this exhibition, visitors were taken on an expedition across time, geographies, cultures and traditions, uncovering multi-generational connections between Britain and South Asia through the cotton industry in Lancashire. Featuring work by artists Raisa Kabir, Brigid McLeer, Bharti Parmar and Reetu Sattar commissioned by the British Textile Biennial 2021, it captures the impact of cotton production on labour, land and the body. 

Journey through punched khadi paper (a paper made from 100% cotton rag) – echoing Gandhi’s campaign to end British rule – to coded Bengali script and job titles of production-line workers captured in handwoven and jacquard textiles.

Cotton: labour, land and body is curated by Uthra Rajgopal. 21st Sept 2022 - 4th March 2023

Supported by the Bagri Foundation. In partnership with The Super Slow Way, the British Textile Biennial and the National Festival of Making.

 

 

 

 

 

A collection of practice

"Gather your spools. Let your hair down for me. Gently. Here. Undo." 2021 Glasgow Centre for Contemporary Art

"Treadle softly. Tightening your warp. Weaving our weft. Binding her braids tightly..." 2019

"Build me a loom off of your back and your stomach..." Whitworth Gallery 2018

Jute  and Flax 2020 from Nil Nargis Blue Solo show 2020 Indigo + Madder London

Detail - "The body is a site of production... Resist! Resist! Resist!" 2017 The Tetley 

Detail from film performance ""Gather your spools. Let your hair down for me. Gently. Here. Undo." 2021

Still from "Nil Nargis Blue. Bring in the tide with your moon..." 2019 Cove Park

 

 

 

"Amar Desh....আমার দেশ. My country. My home. My land. My diaspora. My Motherland is a memory of unwoven dreams..."

Weaving detail 2017

"It must be nice to fall in love" 2017

 

 

 

 

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

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.

 

 

"Gather your spools, let your hair down for me. Gently. Here. Undo." 2021 CCA Glasgow

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

Raisa Kabir performs with a woven head of hair, responding to the textile geographies of labour between Kashmiri woven shawls, Paisley, Scotland, Textile Archives, and South Asian diasporic migration and displacement. A consequent reminder of the colonial imposed borders and the ongoing conflict between India and Pakistan

 

'Ambi '- CCA Glasgow  with Glasgow School of Art - opening 7th May 2021

 

' 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.

 

 

 

Materialising gendered archives: weaving, language, and the global textile object

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/

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