“The Body Remembers” combines painting with weaving, exploring the tension between authorship and tradition. Drawing on traditional icon painting and weaving techniques, the piece reflects on how cultural identity is formed through inherited histories and personal experience. The painting’s rhythmic patterns mirror the woven textile, extending the visual language beyond canvas. The textile, narrow and long, stretches through space, creating a conversation between body, material, and memory. Informed by the artist’s migration to the Netherlands and shaped by queerness and diasporic heritage, the work speaks to the complexities of belonging. It questions the artist’s role in carrying, interpreting, and transmitting tradition in the present.

For this exhibition Hyeonju Lee and Gļeb Maiboroda are bringing their practices together. Situated in a state of in-betweenness, they attempt to capture and materials that exist in a presence of silence. Embodied through the act of drawing and painting, the artists depict places of daily life where the traces of human presence and touch have been left.

Jana Matchavariani and Gleb(s) Maiboroda will present a new body of work which focuses on unveiling the imaginative realm of queer friendship. The exhibition delves into the hidden bonds often obscured in the experience of everyday life. By lifting the veil on long-hidden connections, it illuminates the clandestine relationships and coded messages that linger in the shadows of societal norms. The installation captures a moment where two worlds collide. This merging of realms creates a landscape of soft structure, shadows, golden lights and faint figures, revealing the invisible threads of connections.

Performed at the Centrale Fies Residency (Dro, Italy), performance consisted of a 30-minute choreography in which six performers* unfurled a 21-metre long hand-woven fabric. Through the unravelling of this vast fabric, I wanted to create a space that invited the audience into a situation where something made by hand is treated through touch, preciousness and care. In a world where we are often so desensitised by the effects of global industrialisation, the performers were each given the task to find their own ways of responding to the fabric. Accompanied by a specially composed track with a metronome, this resulted in the performers entering into a somatic state of rhythm and measure. With the metronome creating a fixed beat and pattern, I asked the performers to try and arrive at a point of free movement: a moment in which their bodies found their own rhythm and pace of unravelling while still creating a loop of interconnection between themselves and the audience. In October 2023, a second iteration of this work was performed at Stadtmuseum Deggendorf, Germany.

*Baoxin Liao, Ania Yilmaz, Rex Collins, Meii Soh, Valeria Moro & Claudia Medeiros

The publication explores the transformative relationship between weaving, automation, and the body. Framing thread as a foundational human technology, the work traces the ontological evolution of the automated loom from the Industrial Revolution to contemporary digital processes and the loom’s entanglement with capitalist, colonial, and extractive systems of production. It examines how the mechanisation of textile practices has distanced the act of making from the physical presence of the maker, particularly in the context of fully automated systems such as the Jacquard loom.

Drawing from both artistic and pedagogical practices, the publication proposes somatic approaches to weaving that restore embodied awareness, intuition, and improvisation. Through rhythmic interaction with machines and materials, it reimagines the weaver’s body as a site of resistance and un-learning. Interwoven with reflections by influential thinkers and artists, including Magdalena Abakanowicz, Cecilia Vicuña, Anni Albers, Pauline Oliveros, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, the text offers a critical and sensorial re-engagement with textile-based material culture in the age of automation and AI.

“The Body Remembers” combines painting with weaving, exploring the tension between authorship and tradition. Drawing on traditional icon painting and weaving techniques, the piece reflects on how cultural identity is formed through inherited histories and personal experience. The painting’s rhythmic patterns mirror the woven textile, extending the visual language beyond canvas. The textile, narrow and long, stretches through space, creating a conversation between body, material, and memory. Informed by the artist’s migration to the Netherlands and shaped by queerness and diasporic heritage, the work speaks to the complexities of belonging. It questions the artist’s role in carrying, interpreting, and transmitting tradition in the present.

Practicing to Thread (One's Way) is a fictional autobiography that brings together a variety of found images and texts intersected together into a narrative around queer love and longing. Essentially, the publication questions associative modes of memory production and how those are intricately tied to desire. By introducing an intertwined caption and referencing method, the author suggests an alternative way of looking at texts and sensing images in one unbroken continuum.

Holey Body is a series of textile pieces that inquire into non-frontal representations of the body––a body not bound by upright symmetry and function, but one imagined as a mutable landscape: foldable, wearable, suspended, or laid bare. It resists containment, seeping through surfaces, emerging from other bodies, suggesting the latent potential of movement before it arrives.

In dialogue with dancer Luca Cacitti, the work becomes a choreographic object. One that shifts, collapses, and unfolds through embodied interaction. A dialogue between the material object and a living form that takes shape accordingly. Textile folds, traces, and holes record and respond to the body’s passage, marking a space between garment and gesture, sculpture and skin. What emerges is not fixed form, but a porous field of becoming––an invitation to sense the body otherwise.

The work was presented during the Artwell Residencies Open Studios

Cross-Cloth is a relational artwork that brings together movement, dialogue, and collective experience. Developed in collaboration, the work investigates how processes of migration shape bodily presence and perception within public space.

Through a series of personal conversations, the project explored the embodied impact of displacement and adaptation. These exchanges informed the creation of 4 unique textile pieces–each one made for and in relation to an individual participant. The textiles, interconnected through the form of a cross, evoke the notion of comradery: a shared sense of familiarity, support, and solidarity among individuals navigating common ground. 

A choreography of bodies and cloth born within the interaction, emphasises connection through gesture and material. Cross-Cloth invites reflection on how textile can serve as a medium of mutual recognition, care, and memory across personal and cultural borders.

Cross-Cloth presents a critical inquiry into a 5-year accumulation of archival images. This artist book explores the idea of comradery within the visual culture and is structured as a multi-layered visual essay, challenging fixed readings through a fold-based design. Taking inspiration from the folds in textiles, this publication delves into the fold as a possibility for connection between unrelated sources and images.

Organised into chapters, the book invites the viewer to engage with it physically. Pages unfold both horizontally and vertically, creating an experience of movement and interruption. As images resurface and overlap across spreads, visual constellations begin to form, encouraging a nonlinear encounter with recurring motifs and shifting meanings.

Rather than prescribing a singular narrative, Cross-Cloth foregrounds the viewer’s role in constructing their own interpretation. Through the tactile act of folding and unfolding, the book becomes a site for personal navigation where memory, gaze, and desire intersect across a landscape of layered imagery.

The book is supported with a thesis publication Cross-Clothing designed by Benedikte Hindstedgaard. This publication explores modes of identity production through different forms of folding and taking care of textile bodies, such as napkins, curtains, uniforms, and other.