The Event of a Thread. Global Narratives in Textiles
https://www.neme.org/blog/the-event-of-a-thread-press
NeMe and ifa would like to invite you to the NeMe Arts Centre, Limassol, for:
- Friday, September 4 at 7:30pm, the opening of the exhibition The Event of a Thread. Global Narratives in Textiles;
- Saturday, September 5 at 10am, the curator’s exhibition tour, and at 11am a lecture performance by Judith Raum (Berlin);
- Saturday, October 10, at 11am, lecture presentations by Noly Moyssi & Thekla Kyritsi (Limassol Archives, Limassol Municipal Gardens).
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? 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 globalised world.
Through the cooperation with local co-curators the exhibition becomes an open medium in which it is possible to establish a network of local links, and explore the complex global interdependencies that have been around for generations. Occasionally, interlinking textile motifs may correspond, overlap, or disintegrate. According to the historical and present contexts of the places, every exhibition will bring about a particular character.
Diaspora—I must have swallowed the dust is the title of the installation of Cypriot artist Kyriaki Costa which draws attention to the effects of destroyed the Syrian topographies and the dust that travelled from Syria towards Cyprus. Costa’s work is made of the dust itself, collected during the period of the dust-cloud. In so doing, by manually handling and re-shaping it, the artist creates artefacts made of ‘othered’ contexts. Primarily containing mosaic forms in the shapes of places now lost or destroyed – which the artist located through satellite maps – the installation as a whole alludes to a heterotopia. It contains locations that are constantly ‘othered’ in the current political language in and of the West, and poses a critique towards current practices of ‘othering’. Instead of being descriptive about the locale that she deals with, Costa lets the space itself reveal what it affords through its mere materiality.
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. In the exhibition, weaving threads are utilised as a metaphor, which facilitate the interaction of weaving styles, stories and production techniques from different cultures, and mediate the development of new connections between them.
Starting in Dresden, The Event of a Thread exhibition travelled to Kuwait then to Istanbul to be presented with 13 other artists at Istanbul Modern (co-curator Öykü Oszoy). After this the exhibition travelled to the Negev Museum of Art in Beer Sheva (co-curator Dalia Manor). For the Limassol Edition at the NeMe Arts Centre the exhibition will be accompanied by a lecture performance, on the 5th of September, harmless entrepreneurs, by Berlin based artist Judith Raum and a seminar on the 10th of October with Noly Moyssi & Thekla Kyritsi.
Raum’s artistic research deals with the effects of German financial imperialism on the cultural relations between the German and the Ottoman Empire during the early 20th century. Harmless entrepreneurs, examines the political meaning of economic improvisations within the context of the German economic advance in the Ottoman Empire, focusing on the construction of the Baghdad Railway. Through text, images and lecture performance, Judith Raum will take the audience into a journey to 19th century textile producers in Bavaria and their intricate connectedness with the outreach of imperialist machinery via the textile trade and business connections with the Ottoman Empire as part of the Baghdad Railway project.
Artists: Ulla von Brandenburg, Kyriaki Costa, Noa Eshkol, Andreas Exner, Uli Fischer, Zille Homma Hamid, Heide Hinrichs, Olaf Holzapfel, Christa Jeitner, Elisa van Joolen & Vincent Vulsma, Eva Meyer & Eran Schaerf, Karen Michelsen Castañón, Judith Raum, Franz Erhard Walther and the Bauhaus Space
Curators: Susanne Weiß and Inka Gressel (ifa), for the Limassol Edition in cooperation with NeMe.
Project Manager: Clea Laade (ifa).
ifa is the oldest international cultural and educational relations body in Germany. It promotes peaceful coexistence between people and cultures worldwide. ifa values contemporary art as an important medium for international dialogue and organises exhibitions on contemporary visual arts, architecture, design, and photography that place current discourses within a broader context all over the world and create local platforms for encounters.
Exhibition opening: 4 September 2020, 7:30pm
Curator’s exhibition tour: 5 September 2020, 10am
Performance by Judith Raum: 5 September 2020, 11am
Lectures by Noly Moyssi & Thekla Kyritsi: Saturday, 10 October, 11am (venue to be announced)
Exhibition duration: 4 September – 24 October 2020
Opening days/hours: Tuesday – Friday, 17:30-20:30; Saturday: 10:00-13:00
Address: Corner of Ellados and Enoseos streets; 3041 Limassol, Cyprus
Covid-19
Note that for the exhibition, the seminar, the curator’s tour, and the performance NeMe will comply to the government regulations regarding personal protection and the spatial distancing governing the number of visitors allowed in the space at any one time.
Image credit: Eva Meyer and Eran Schaerf, In the Habit. A Set Piece (Wie gewohnt. Ein Versatzstück), 2017/1997; Still, one channel film, 27 Min.
