Opening time
05
April 2025.
The event of a thread: Global narratives in textiles
Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina, Dunavska 37, Novi Sad
Date of the exhibition: 05/03‒25/05/2025
Curators:
Susanne Weiß, Inka Gressel, ifa – Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen
Sanja Kojić Mladenov, Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina
Artists:
Atelje 61 / Nada Adžić Poznanović, Ulla von Brandenburg, Milica Dukić, Noa Eshkol, Andreas Exner, Uli Fischer, Zille Homma Hamid, Heide Hinrichs, Olaf Holzapfel, Ivana Ivković, Christa Jeitner, Elisa van Joolen & Vincent Vulsma, NEpraktične žeNE + škart , Marinela Koželj, Eva Meyer & Eran Schaerf, Karen Michelsen Castañón, Tanja Ostojić, Judith Raum, Rena Rädle & Vladan Jeremić , Franz Erhard Walther, zajedno sa „Bauhaus prostorom”
International exhibition “The Event of a Thread: Global Narratives in Textiles”, organized by ifa - Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, the Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina, Novi Sad and the Goethe-Institute in Belgrade.
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.
Andreas Exner, Aldi-Vorhang, 1999 stitched fabric, 500 x 500 cm Photo Uwe Walther © VG Bild-Kunst
The artist Judith Raum developed “The Bauhaus Space” for the exhibition, an visual archive and installation dedicated to the history of the weaving workshop of Bauhaus Dessau.. We encounter rewoven fabrics and historic materials in a specially designed display (design: Jakob Kirch; architecture: S.T.I.F.F.) 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.
Building on the concept of the original exhibition, the Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina also exhibits works of art by the artists from Serbia, who deal with the specific socio-political context of their own environment. They emphasize the importance of emancipatory practice, activism and community as important characteristics of the use of textiles in local historical and contemporary artistic practice. The exhibition will feature works from the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina, the National Museum of Užice and the "Atelier 61" from Novi Sad.
