Raisa Kabir

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

"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

Cove Park Craft Residency Summer 2019

Cove Park Craft and Design Residency  Summer Programme 2019  https://covepark.org/artists/raisa-kabir/ 

Raisa Kabir 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. 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, disability and the body as a living archive of collective trauma.  Her practice currently 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. Weaving as a methodology for resistance.

She has participated in residencies and exhibited work at The Whitworth, The Tetley, Raven Row, Textile Arts Center NYC, and the Center for Craft Creativity and Design U.S. 

 

 

'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