The last in a series of exhibitions investigating contemporary approaches to fiber art curated by Murtaza Vali, Bound: Textiles Between Loss and Repair 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—recall both shrouds and bandages, blurring distinctions between our experience of loss or injury and our capacity for recovery and renewal. 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.
The eye-catching palette of Dana Awartani’s Let me mend your broken bones 16 (2023) belies the weight of its subject matter: the destruction of built heritage across West Asia and beyond. Awartani precisely rips each diaphanous silk panel—naturally dyed green, yellow, red and orange in Kerala with medicinal herbs commonly used in South Asian and Arab cultures—to recreate the outlines of damage inflicted on actual buildings, which are identified in an adjacent text panel, along with their location and the date, time, and perpetrators of their destruction. The holes are then carefully filled in with matching thread by master darners in Mumbai, transforming wounds into scars, producing an index of both injury and repair. Awartani’s considered material and processual choices—her use of medicinal herbs and traditional dyeing techniques, her collaborations with skilled artisans—posit an ethic of making that offers a type of symbolic healing against the ideological obliteration of architectural heritage.
Jumana Manna’s Theory of an Unfinished Building (River) (2022) is part of her ongoing sculptural investigation focused on infrastructure, which seeks to elevate materials and objects that are often overlooked but, in her words, “expose, transform and bind us to one another and the spaces we cohabit.” A wall-mounted patchwork of worn fabric stretched across a simple scaffold-like wooden frame, it adopts the monumental scale of modernist abstract painting while its riverine palette of blue, green, purple and white recalls Monet’s iconic Water Lilies. Manna scavenged the thin gauze-like ‘dust catchers’ from various building sites, where the material is used to contain airborne debris generated during construction or renovation. A familiar feature in fast growing cities like Dubai, this found material is symbolic of a neoliberal logic of urban development and gentrification, shrouding the body of a city in transition and obscuring from view the bodies and processes that enable such transformations.
Hana Miletić’s ongoing “Materials” series (2015-) consists of hand-woven textile pieces that recreate makeshift repairs she encounters in the city: a taped plastic sheet covering up a broken car window; radiating or crisscrossing strips holding a cracked glass door or window together; saggy loops of red-and-white-striped caution tape, demarcating or limiting entry to a work area; and three easy-to-miss pieces of masking tape, reminiscent of adhesive bandage, marking spots that require final touch ups. Often custom dyeing yarn to carefully match the source, Miletić meticulously translates the thin, smooth synthetic surface of adhesive tape and plastic sheets and strips into the organic textured weave of bandages. Though the shift from their original contexts might transform these compositions into seemingly arbitrary, colorful abstractions, this important material transition expands what (or who) the original reparative gestures are directed towards to include the invisible bodies that inhabit, utilize, and maintain the built environment.
Dala Nasser’s Misk 1 (2023) and Misk 2 (2023) take their title from the Arabic word for mastic, a resin harvested from the barks of trees endemic to the Greek island of Chios, where the works were made. Referred to as the ‘tears of Chios,’ the translucent droplets of dried resin have long been used around the Mediterranean as medicine, specifically to treat digestive ailments and as breath freshener, and to give food a chewy mouthfeel. Reflecting on this history and the networks of trade and movement it spawned, Nasser’s paintings register the place and process of their making, synthesizing material and symbolic references to both healing and mourning. Fabric with charcoal rubbings of mastic trees are dyed with pigment made from lapis lazuli, giving them its characteristic blue hue. While the rubbings recall the Shroud of Turin—the famed relic believed to have been used to wrap Jesus’ body after his crucifixion and to bear an imprint of his face—the precious blue pigment, called ultramarine, came to be associated with the Virgin Mary and was exclusively used to color her robe in both Eastern Orthodox and Renaissance art. Ultramarine means ‘beyond the sea,’ a reference to lapis lazuli’s maritime import from mines in Afghanistan, yet, in the context of the recent history of Greek islands like Chios, its use also seems to mourn the countless refugees fleeing war and hardship in West Asia and beyond who have drowned in the Mediterranean, their bodies enshrouded only by its vibrant blue waters.
Khalil Rabah’s Tattoo (1996) is a modified keffiyeh, with the black threads that make up the traditional patterns woven into it—the fishnet that fills the center and the repeating olive leaves that frame it—carefully extracted and collected in a pile underneath the hanging scarf. In contrast to the permanent mark, inscribed in ink onto skin, that its title references, what remains is a ghostly trace. Yet, this shadow does not evoke a lost body but rather a collective spirit that perseveres despite repeated attempts to violently and systematically erase it. Both a memorial to loss and a testament to the capacity to overcome it, Rabah’s iconoclastic Tattoo reverts this potent symbol of Palestinian identity and resistance into something simpler and more universal: a sheet of gauze.
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In November 2023, a poem by Emily Berry entitled “Because of Us” began to circulate widely across social media. Drafted in response to the unrelenting bombardment of Gaza, it momentarily disrupted the interminable live feed of photographs and videos of enshrouded corpses and bandaged heads, bodies, and limbs emerging from there. In it, Berry recalls the origins of the English word ‘gauze,’ which is derived from the Arabic for Gaza, an acknowledgement of the area’s historical renown as a center of textile production. Used to dress wounds, gauze, despite its delicate open weave, holds the capacity to repair and heal. The works in this exhibition embody this and other such dualities and the roles textiles play in navigating our way through them. Bound but unrestrained, each is a memorial of sorts, aching with grief and resilience.
