Between The Lines explores how contemporary artists engage with the medium of textile. One of the oldest forms of artmaking, textile has drifted in and out of the margins of art history, often sidelined as ‘women’s work’ or ‘craft’. The recent resurgence of interest in this medium may be attributed to a consideration of modes of artmaking and cultural expression outside of a Western modernist paradigm, and precipitated by the global pandemic lockdowns and rapid digitalization of the world which prompted a renewed interest in tactility and the handmade.
The exhibition’s title makes reference to the materiality of textile, composed from the interweaving of lines – its warp and weft. These vectors embody histories and the transmission of cultures and traditions, transformed by the hand of the artist into new narratives for our time.Between The Lines also explores textile’s subtext or its socio-political dimension, encapsulated in the processes of its creation, as well as its physical attributes of portability and apparent innocuousness – qualities that render textile an agile medium for conveying narratives of resilience and resistance. Last but not least, the exhibition brings together textile-based works that foreground crossroads and interstices, blurring the lines between creative disciplines, cultures and hierarchies.
Between The Lines is open to public from 29 Feb, 2024 – 26 May, 2024.
Email siuli@appetitesg.com to book an exhibition tour.
Between The Lines: Appetite, Singapore | Curated by Tan Siuli
Past exhibition
Alexander Sebastianus Hartanto reworks the traditional ikat technique and its symmetrical motifs into poetic abstractions – in the words of the artist, “paint(ing) memories in formless colours and haze, blurring the essence of what we can remember”, and deftly traversing the lines between painting and weaving, ‘fine art’ and ‘craft’. This labour-intensive process of creation also brings to the fore the repetitive and meditative nature of weaving, foregrounding the distinction between an older understanding of making as ritual or offering (as embodied in the Indonesian term sani) and the more modern concept of art as a finished object for display and circulation.