PAST

Bound: Textiles Between Loss and Repair, curated by Murtaza Vali, builds on notions of nurture and care long associated with cloth, which envelopes our bodies from our first breath to our last. Bringing together works by Dana Awartani, Jumana Manna, Hana Miletić, Dala Nasser and Khalil Rabah, Bound explores the importance of fabric in how we tend to bodies in pain, and the key role it plays in rituals and processes of both mourning and healing. Largely abstract, these works—through their facture, form, and materiality—resemble both shrouds and bandages, blurring distinctions between our experience of loss or injury and our capacity for recovery. Diaphanous dyed silk is carefully ripped and then darned. Gauzy dust covers salvaged from construction sites are collaged together. Frottage-like imprints of trees, in charcoal on fabric, are stained and rubbed with pigment. Handwoven bands of precisely colored yarn recreate found acts of everyday urban repair. A symbolic scarf is carefully unraveled without being undone. The absent body evoked in and by these works extends beyond the individual and/or the human to the collective, to the body politic, to landscape and nature, and to architecture and urban space. Bound but unrestrained, each work is a memorial of sorts, aching with grief and resilience.

All images courtesy of the Artist and Green Art Gallery, Dubai. Photography by Anna Shtraus.