Wolle. Seide. Widerstand
Museum Angewandte Kunst, Frankfurt am Main
Traditionally, carpets as floor coverings or wall hangings have served the living environments and domestic spaces of various cultures. Yet it is precisely this everyday textile furnishing that today inspires international artists, through their creative freedom, to employ the carpet as an iconic means of expressing their explicit critique within the art space.
(Applied) art as a form of resistance — in this sense, the special exhibition Wolle. Seide. Widerstand brings together carpets by contemporary artists who engage with different facets of resistance. In doing so, they explore the enduring crafts of knotting, weaving, knitting and tufting within traditional and expanded contexts, reinterpreting the utilitarian, decorative and spiritual aspects of a floor covering or wall hanging in novel ways to serve a medial understanding and its iconographic, pop-cultural and political image strategies. In the same radical manner, they sometimes break through the boundaries of the traditionally flat carpet format. Acts of defiance, opposition, or anything that counters or obstructs someone or something, as well as political resistance (active, passive), resistance movements, or resilience and resistance strength, take literally diverse and at times extravagant forms within the exhibition.
While the great interest in handcrafted textiles of all kinds has been reflected in a striking number of exhibitions in recent years, this exhibition at the Museum Angewandte Kunst focuses on the medium of the carpet. The exhibition, which also addresses young people and adults through an extensive educational and accompanying programme, aims to shed light on the aesthetics of textile art objects from a transcultural perspective under the aspect of resistance, and to question in a unique way the discursive capacity of applied art in the present. Furthermore, the exhibition seeks to raise awareness of novel works that will only become established in museum collections in the future.