Missing Threads: disentangling the colonial ‘fabric’

As part of the exhibition Threads of Kinship, Missing Threads: disentangling the colonial ‘fabric’ is a conversation organized by AWARE and KADIST with artist Erika Tan and researcher Aurélie Petiot, moderated by Nina Volz, Head of International Development at AWARE.

This event connects with AWARE’s research programme The Flow of History. Southeast Asian Women Artists and questions highlighted by KADIST’s Threads of Kinship exhibition, which departs from the history of the Self-Comb Sisters. Stepping outside patriarchal life, the traces of these women from the silk production industry in Guangdong, China, have largely been erased.

Archives are also lacking in the case of the forgotten weaver Halimah Binti Abdullah, who participated in the 1924 British Empire Exhibition in the United Kingdom — a figure artist Erika Tan explores in a long-term artistic project. A record of this weaver’s work lasts in an incomplete textile on an unfinished loom preserved in a European museum.

In conversation with artist Erika Tan and researcher Aurélie Petiot, the event will reflect on what is missing in dominant narratives, as well as on research and artistic methodologies for reconstituting or reimagining these absences. At the same time, it will critically examine the “present part of the loom,” brought into circulation in a colonial context.

Drawing on Tan’s artistic work and Petiot’s research on Egypt and Palestine under the British Empire, the discussion will consider how microhistories can contribute to a broader understanding of cultural history. Particular attention will be given to the narrative and material potential of textiles, grounded in the labor involved, and to the status attributed to textile and craft in relation to gender and coloniality.

• https://soundcloud.com/kadist/missing-th...