The Event of a Thread: Global Narratives in Textiles

5.3‒25.5.25 / Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina / Novi Sad / Serbien

International exhibition “The Event of a Thread: Global Narratives in Textiles”, organized by ifa – Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, the Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina, Novi Sad and the Goethe-Institute in Belgrade.

Textiles are at the heart of the ifa touring exhibition, which focuses on questions including: 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? Which traditional textile techniques have artists appropriated, abstracted, relocated and brought back to life? Textiles constitute a locus in which art encounters handicraft, traditions meet the present day, and local knowledge intersects with global relationships.

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 globalized world. 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.