Threads of Kinship

The Weavers Lament (video work) shown in Threads of Kinship, He Art Museum, Guangdong, China.

KADIST and He Art Museum present the second edition of Threads of Kinship, an exhibition tracing histories of care, autonomy, and chosen kinship through material practices.

Curators
Shona Mei Findlay, Yuan Fuca, Marie Martraire (KADIST) in conversation with He Art Museum curatorial team

Artists
Pacita Abad, Minia Biabiany, Rossella Biscotti, Santiago Borja, Xyza Cruz Bacani, Cao Fei, Chang Dai-chien, Chen Danqing, Chen Jialu, Ding Yi, Fang Rending, Meschac Gaba, Laura Gannon, Juliana Góngora, Jorge González, Guan Liang, Han Mengyun, Hu Yinping, Huang Zhou, Bayrol Jiménez, Tarik Kiswanson, Jaffa Lam, Seulgi Lee, Lin Fengmian, Ma Qiusha, Marie-Claire Messouma Manlanbien, Amor Muñoz, Otobong Nkanga, Pan Yuliang, Charmaine Poh, Qi Baishi, Ashmina Ranjit, Angélica Serech, José María Sicilia, Erika Tan, Subash Thebe Limbu, Tromarama, Wang Ye, James Webb, Margo Wolowiec, Wu Guanzhong, Yang Zhiguang, and Yee I-Lann

Threads of Kinship brings together 44 modern and contemporary artists whose works engage with the lived histories of collectivity through material practices of care, autonomy, and chosen kinship across generations and geographies. Building on its first iteration at KADIST Paris (October 2025–January 2026), this second iteration deepens the curatorial dialogue between HEM and KADIST. The newly added works expand an exploration of the local legacy of Guangdong’s Self-Comb Sisters–women in the early 20th-century who chose to live and work collectively with silk production as a means to support their livelihood. Structured around four interwoven curatorial strands the exhibition considers: the formation of female collectives and alternative kinship structures through the power of textiles and questions of body and belonging; how diasporic movement, and extractive and economic systems shape both artistic production and lived experience; the historical and contemporary entanglements between coding, weaving, and technological knowledge; and it looks toward speculative futures and mythologies that reimagine how communities might endure and transform.

This is the second iteration of an exhibition presented at KADIST in fall 2025.

• https://kadist.org/work/the-weavers-lame...
• https://kadist.org/program/threads-of-ki...