The Event of a Thread: Global Narratives in Textiles

International exhibition “The Event of a Thread: Global Narratives in Textiles”, organized by ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen) and MoCA – Skopje.

Curated by Susanne Weiß, Inka Gressel, and Jovanka Popova.

The exhibition will be opened on Tuesday, May 28 starting at 8:00 p.m.

Textiles are at the heart of the ifa touring exhibition, which focuses on questions including: What inherent meanings and messages can be found in fabrics? What is their cultural significance? How can textiles be ‘read’? What can fabrics tell us about their origins, meanings and social roles? Which traditional textile techniques have artists appropriated, abstracted, relocated and brought back to life? Textiles constitute a locus in which art encounters handicraft, traditions meet the present day, and local knowledge intersects with global relationships.

The exhibition highlights the multiple complex ways in which the participating artists work with textiles. They link personal and aesthetic narratives with the social and economic configuration of a globalized world. In 1965, Bauhaus artist Anni Albers described “the event of a thread” as something multilinear, without beginning or end: more broadly, it signifies constant scope to rethink relations and to restructure connections and contexts.

The artist Judith Raum developed “The Bauhaus Space” for the exhibition, an installation dedicated to the Bauhaus weaving workshop. We encounter rewoven fabrics and historic materials in a specially designed display that unfolds its extraordinary success story in six chapters.

Every part of the world can attest the complex inscription of textiles into cultural and industrial history. In a political climate marked by detachment and cruelty, textiles hold the power to evoke reminiscences of earlier heartfelt humane times, to remind us how precious handcrafts are, to call to compassion and solidarity. Hence, in cooperation with local contemporary artists, the main body of the exhibition is complemented by artworks that create new narratives relevant to the textile in the local context and their engaged response to the various oppression forms, systematic but also interpersonal.

In this context, the artworks featured in the Museum collection in Skopje are exhibited not only as testimonies to the lived experiences and memories emerged from the earthquake, rather as a vivid reminder of how necessary these interrupted threads of global support and empathy networks are, transforming the tragic event of personal and collective loss into a transnational solidarity model.

Artists: Ulla von Brandenburg, Kristina Bozurska, Yane Calovski and Hristina Ivanoska, Noa Eshkol, Andreas Exner, Uli Fischer, Zille Homma Hamid, Heide Hinrichs, Olaf Holzapfel, Christa Jeitner, Elisa van Joolen & Vincent Vulsma, Jovan Josifovski, Eva Meyer & Eran Schaerf, Karen Michelsen Castañón, Judith Raum, Franz Erhard Walther, Zorica Zafirovska and Klelija Zivkovic; along with the “Bauhaus Space”, a visual archive on the history of the weaving workshop of Bauhaus Dessau and Weimar (artistic research: Judith Raum; design: Jakob Kirch; architecture: S.T.I.F.F.) and the artworks from the artists in the MoCA Skopje Collection:  Sonja Dimitrova, Dimche Koco, Jolanta Owidska, Ismet Ramicevic, Lisa Rehsteiner, Mira Spirovska, Dushko Stojanovski, Patricia Velasco Wallin. 

The exhibition project has been supported by the German Embassy – North Macedonia and Goethe Institut – North Macedonia and Tikveš. 

Cover Image: Yane Calovski and Hristina Ivanoska, Uprooted (detail), 2015.