A needle piercing an eye, the image sewn with human hair. Another needle through a nipple and a third sews the lips shut to silence them. Apart from the body, human hair can be waste – there is something objectionable and horrible about hair clogging the sink – and it can be a sentimental memento kept in a locket. It can become a common thread. You can draw or sew with it. In this work, Hong Kong artist Angela Su does both. You have to get close and you want to step away. She gives us something of herself that is filled with pain.
Solange Pessoa’s teardrop-shaped, bulging bags of earth collapse and swell like bags of intestines in a hammock. Magdalena Abakanowicz’s sisal body hangs from above, as heavy and dark and as shrouded and mysterious as a bat hanging in a cave. A small, sewn pink woman, by Louise Bourgeois, floats above her shadow and falls forever. Sometimes it’s impossible to know what we’re looking at: Like something between a body part and an alien underwear, Xhosa artist Nicholas Hlobo’s Babelana Ngentloko (“they share a head”) trails long tentacle-like ribbons behind a bulging white leather. pouch. You can imagine finding this in an aquarium, under a microscope, in a jar in a medical museum or in an exotic lingerie store. Almost a painting, a relief or a drawing, but not quite any of these things: Hlobo’s work turns towards us, as if aware of our presence.
Hybrid, heterodox, filled with strangeness and anger, beauty and horror, Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art at the Barbican is often beautifully exaggerated, at other times quiet and private, only revealing its secrets if you stick around. It is also filled with stories and materiality, tenderness and violence. This great, tangled knot of an exhibition interweaves the delicate and the intemperate, the flamboyant and funereal, the ancestral and the mundane.
We visit a neighborhood bodega in Tschabalala Self’s evocations of Harlem’s rapidly disappearing communal life, and revisit Tracey Emin’s teenage trauma, in a 1999 appliqued blanket that celebrates her anger and resistance over the experience of rape as a 13-year-old schoolgirl. There are scenes from traditional Roma life in Poland and from the spirit world of Haitian Voudu. We swim among the groupers, turtles and rays on the coral reef made of recycled fabrics from Tau Lewis, and come across Margarita Cabrera’s green cacti, sewn from US Border Patrol uniforms, with the insignia still visible, by Spanish-speaking immigrants.
LJ Roberts’ small images, wedged under glass and perpendicular to the gallery wall, depict levee parades and protests after a transphobic attack. We can also see the flip sides of these embroideries, all the incidental loose and hidden threads that loop and twist in a kind of incidental recognition of the complexity and messiness of relationships. The complexity is more than material. Sheila Hicks asked friends and relatives for their most beloved garments, which she then wrapped and decorated with colored threads, presenting them as a pile of multi-colored balls in a display case, each containing secrets and memories.
During Unravel there are moments when I am silenced, touched and moved by the intimacies that the works capture. Sewing and embroidery, beading and weaving, and the quiet attention given to the completion of the work, often beg for our own closeness and attention to the small details. Physical intimacy is often important here. José Leonilson made embroidered texts about life as a queer man with HIV in São Paulo in the early 1990s. Time was running out, but he chose a medium that required long periods of concentration. The rest required to create the work may well have been therapeutic. These are troubled works. Similarly, Paraguayan artist Feliciano Centurión’s embroidered mixes of text and images look like samplers. “I am a soul in pain,” he wrote in one. “Estoy vivo!” (“I’m alive!”) in another. The words arise amid blooming flowers.
Then life rushes in with a roar. In a tapestry by Diedrick Brackens, one black man carries another from a burning building, escaping the flames that burst around them in the gout of billowing, hooked acrylic yarn erupting from the surface.
Sometimes we have to get close and sometimes we are surrounded. Igshaan Adams takes us on a walk through the hinterland between two South African townships that were historically deliberately separated. Using aerial photographs to map these areas of division and exclusion, and the paths people take between them, Adams navigates physical and spiritual proximity and distances. Slender twisting and turning wires and threads create floating clouds and dust devils, studded with eddies of beads and shells, in a kind of suspended particle soup through which we walk, as if we have kicked up dust between places and times. Stirring up dust is what Adams does.
All media have their history, and textiles go back as far as possible. However you define it, and with its narrower definitions such as appliqué or knitting, sewing or sewing, tapestry or embroidery, weaving or quilting, the work here alternates between one and the other – from nature to artifice, from image to object, from process to protest, storytelling to commemoration.
In a room there are two slabs, each like a bier or an autopsy table, lit from below. Each has a textile on it, filled with images and symbols. One is soaked in the blood of a woman murdered in Panama City, the other bears bloody handprints and commemorates the murder of Eric Garner during his arrest on Staten Island in 2014. Mexican artist Teresa Margolles made one shroud-like textiles in collaboration with a family of Kuna descent, the other at the Harlem Needle art institute. These communal works ask whether wounds can ever heal. When dealing with trauma, anger and the possibility of healing, the medium is not the message, but it is a perfect vehicle. Repairing and renewing, sewing and weaving and joining, patching and sheathing are an integral part of the textile art.
There’s almost too much to unpack here. This often delightful, sometimes moving collaboration between the Barbican and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam is one of the best and most thought-provoking I’ve seen on this subject. Call it fiber art or textile art, call it high art or low art, do we still want to discuss whether textiles are crafts, applied art or fine art? Call it what you want – textiles here often involve drawing, sculpting and painting by other means. They are also clothes and rugs and blankets, pictures and maps, totems and abstractions, repositories of history and memory. The exhibition unravels with dyes and blood, pain, pleasure, politics and history. Life and death run through it.