Posted at 02:10 PM in Art, Contemplative , Conversation, Craft, Decolonizing, Design, Documentary, Documentation, Film, residency, South Asian, Textiles, Threads, woven | Permalink
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.
Posted at 03:40 PM in Art, Conversation, Craft, Decolonizing, Design, Documentary, Exhibition, Fibre, Film, Photography, Reflection, research, residency, South Asian, Textiles, Threads, woven | Permalink
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
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
"Gather your spools, let your hair down for me. Gently. Here. Undo." 2021
Posted at 07:42 PM in Conversation, Craft, Decolonizing, Design, South Asian, 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