Cyprus Mail 27 August 2020 - by Eleni Philippou
“In textiles,” describes Germany’s oldest intermediary organisation for international cultural relations, Ifa, “tradition meets the present, arts meet crafts, local forms of knowledge meet global relationships.”
It is referring to a current exhibition that is touring the world. It’s next stop? Limassol.
“There is hardly a region in which textiles have not inscribed themselves into cultural and industrial history. Thus, textiles also narrate the migration and evolution of materials and techniques.”
Textiles are at the heart of the Ifa touring exhibition titled The Event of a Thread and focuses on central questions. 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 and traditions intersect with modern life. 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.
But what’s with the title of the exhibition? 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.
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.
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. After this, the exhibition travelled to the Negev Museum of Art in Beer Sheva, Israel. For the Limassol edition at the NeMe Arts Centre, between September 4 and October 24, the exhibition will be accompanied by a lecture performance, on September 5, by Berlin-based artist Judith Raum and a seminar on October 10 with Noly Moyssi and Thekla Kyritsi.
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 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 reshaping 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.
The Event of a Thread
Ifa touring exhibition, in Limassol with the participation of Cypriot artist Kyriaki Costa. September 4-October 24. NeMe Arts Centre, Limassol. Tuesday – Friday: 5.30 pm – 8.30 pm. Saturday: 10 am – 1 pm
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