Entanglements North-South presentation

The arts can serve as a means to bring people together and connections between people and communities can take place in many ways. Although these connections are often complex and tangled, they can be surprisingly resilient, as illustrated by this collaboration that emerged during periods of isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic. This exhibition explores the connections that evolve around people, natural environments, creativity, care and identity expressions. These textiles are discussing the questions of identity. We are shaped by our lifecycles that take us through different contexts are they geographical or social. The more pluriveral we dare to be more we understand about our privilege and history. The more we become one with our natural environment the more we merge with nature. Maybe, histories teach us to stand with uneasiness of the contemporary and nature teaches us the care for all the living.


The exhibition illustrates the outcomes of artistic and research collaborations of four artist-researchers who engage in digital bioart and co-creation with non-humans. The collaboration stimulates artistic practices and use of raw materials that engage in “seeing the unseen”, potential resources we have right on our doorstep or in our pantry, and exploring how we can co-create in more innovative, sustainable and comprehensive ways. There is a possibility to express the dialectics between the different artists- researches, of both human and non-human identity, by collecting these multisensory stimuli.

What is the role of care in bioart? What are the limitations to care in bioart? What kinds of knowledge is excluded from bioart-based research? Are there boundaries to bioart?

The collection of four textiles are entangled in a dialogue that seeks to explore how the arts can play a role in social change, especially when margins are continually moved to elicit new spaces for transformation. Printed fabric design processes involve many translations, moving from analog to digital, and back. Translating collected data (arctic raw materials: reindeer blood, drawings, photos) via a digital software into colours, images and patterns (point, lines, surfaces), and planting them in a digital environment, then making these digital images material again through printing. What do we gain and lose in these translations? The delay and depth associated with time, space and place disappear in digital images and surfaces. The volume is not even the measure of the printed fabric, because reality and narratives are hidden in the flatness of the printed surface. This is further developed in relation to your inspiration to jacquard prints. The patterns are free form and organic and the colours represent nature.