The word ‘resistance’ has been doing a lot of heavy lifting of late. It travels from biennial to press release to curatorial statement with such frequency that its threads have grown thin. Yet as you walk into ‘Wool. Silk. Resistance.’ at Frankfurt’s Museum Angewandte Kunst (Museum of Applied Art), Faig Ahmed’s works simply stop you mid-step. Virgin (2016) hangs on the wall, its upper part an immaculate carpet of arabesques and star-shaped blossoms, peaceful, organized. And then, beneath, the form gives out. Long red threads spurt outwards like blood from a wound. A rupture of Azerbaijani dowry-weaving traditions, severed yet pulsing with life.
Doubts?2020 (2020) pursues this logic further into space. An Ushak medallion carpet – the kind produced for the Ottoman court from the 16th century onwards – begins on the wall, symmetrical to the point of theological certitude, and ends on the floor, dissolving into an abstract swirl as it falls. Ahmed’s works, like many others in the show, brazenly defy the spatial limitations of their support: wall and floor, vertical and horizontal, tradition and its dissolution.
Resistance is, of course, inherently woven into the history of textile-making: from the foundational myth of Arachne, who dared to weave her critique of the gods into a majestic tapestry, only to be transformed into a spider by the infuriated Athena (Ovid, 8 CE), to the women who, during Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile (1973–90), turned to stitching arpilleras – patchwork pictures on burlap that bore witness to daily terrors and were distributed secretly through the Church’s Vicariate of Solidarity. Whereas fine art is never required to argue for its transgressive power, for textile-making, historically gendered and kept on the threshold of the domestic, it’s a different story. The repeated need to make the case for craft quietly reinstates the very hierarchy it seeks to dismantle.
Across its dimly lit galleries, the exhibition gathers almost 40 contemporary textile works. Tobias Rehberger’s woven wall pieces fuse imagery from personal, everyday photographs with documentation of political events (Koloman Wallisch in glazed ducks, 2022), while Alexandra Kehayoglou’s Paraná de las Palmas River (2021) forms a walkable sculptural landscape. Three tapestry rugs from Noelle Mason’s ‘Ground Control’ series (2014–19) lie on the floor: derived from satellite images of the drought-stricken landscape along the US–Mexico border, they are produced by weavers at the Taller Mexicano de Gobelinos (Mexican Tapestry Workshop) in Guadalajara, whom Mason pays exactly what a family of four would need to cross into the US illegally.
Otobong Nkanga’s monumental Unearthed – Twilight (2021) pulls at a similar, inverting thread. A dense weave of organic and synthetic fibres – mohair, merino, monofilament, polyester and linen – it formally invokes the idealized pastoral of the verdure tapestry tradition, only to systematically dismantle it, substituting scenes of abundance with the wreckage of extraction and the dispersed bodies of those lost in the Middle Passage.
In Erin M. Riley’s handwoven tapestry Affair, The (2022), a computer screen shows a webcam image of a naked, tattooed woman. The browser tabs above reference a fatal shooting, a suicide hotline and a drug prevention campaign. With slow, repetitive weaving, Riley reclaims what the screen captured instantly and without consent. In Revolution in Poetic Language (1974), the philosopher Julia Kristeva distinguishes the symbolic from the semiotic. If the screen belongs to the symbolic order – where signs are fixed and legible – then weaving remains tethered to what Kristeva reclaims as the semiotic: a layer of rhythm, drive and bodily repetition rooted in the chora, a formless, maternal space that language must continually suppress but can never fully contain. As text hardens into meaning, textile holds the tremor before it sets. Each pass of the shuttle leaves a trace, accumulated slowly, rhythmically. Thread by thread, pass by pass.
‘Wool. Silk. Resistance.’ is on view at Frankfurt’s Museum Angewandte Kunst until 14 June