Textiles as a Form of Feminist Dissent
Lauren Elkin, frieze
February 2024
The power of textile art to surprise, unsettle, provoke and disobey is the subject of an upcoming show at London’s Barbican Art Gallery. ‘Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art’, curated by Lotte Johnson and Wells Fray-Smith with Amanda Pinatih of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, contends that contemporary artists have turned to textiles and fibre in their work ‘to grapple with systems of power and hierarchies, and therefore histories and lived experiences of oppression and extraction, in order to forge new visions of the world in which we live’, as Johnson puts it in the catalogue. […]