Raisa Kabir – SAIC Graduate Exhibition 2024

SAIC SHOWS 2024 GRADUATE EXHIBITIONS

Graduates

SAIC SHOWS 2024 GRADUATE EXHIBITIONS

Raisa Kabir

Master of Fine Arts in Studio, Fiber and Material Studies

Graduate Exhibition Two

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Raisa Kabir is an interdisciplinary artist and weaver. Kabir uses woven text/textiles and performance to materialise concepts concerning the interwoven cultural politics of cloth. Kabir’s work draws on textile mobilities, embodied archives, and geographies of anti-colonial resistance. Kabir’s (un)weaving performances unpick and unravel structures of trans-national power, globalised production, and material extraction of labour.

Kabir has exhibited work internationally at The Whitworth, Liverpool Biennial, Whitechapel Gallery, Australian Design Centre, Asia Art Now Paris, India Art Fair, Raven Row, The Craft Council London, CCA Glasgow, Archive Berlin, British Textile Biennial, Glasgow International, Ford Foundation Gallery NYC, and the Center for Craft, Creativity, and Design NC.

Kabir has lectured and shared her research at Tate Modern, the V&A Museum of Art and Design, Institute of Contemporary Art London, Paul Mellon Centre of British Studies Yale The Courtauld, Royal College of Art, and Central Saint Martins.

Raisa Kabir - House Full of Water

House Full of Water, 2023, Performance Fort Aguada, Goa, India.

Detail of weaving in the 17th Century colonial prison cell, weaving between two sets of bars. Part of the Antibodies Festival 2023

Raisa Kabir - Utterances: Our vessels for the stories unspoken. Subaqueous violence. Sea. Ocean...

Utterances: Our vessels for the stories unspoken. Subaqueous violence. Sea. Ocean..., 2023, Performance Stanley Dock, Liverpool Biennial, England.

Raisa Kabir - House Full of Water

House Full of Water, 2023, Performance Fort Aguada, Goa, India.

My artistic practice takes an interdisciplinary approach to hand woven textiles, using performance-film, sound, and text to decipher and complicate global matrixes of power, production, and geographies of labour. I use linen, jute, cotton, silk, indigo and cochineal as tools to address their intertwined trans-national histories, of racialised labour and European colonial extraction.

My tapestries incorporate an ‘unwoven’ technique with a theory of queer entanglement. A process of unmaking and tangling to resist or ‘queer’ ideas around labour, productivity, and functionality. My work uses these methods to investigate mobilities of textile cultures, the cultivation and crossing of borders, and sites of resistance to cultural imperialism. I believe in the power of weaving knowledge systems and technologies to have the potentiality to transform and remake the world. To draw attention to the structures of violence we are struggling to disentangle from and reform.

Performance is used as a strategic method to disrupt space and create craft intervention to site specific works, and geographies. I translate the intensive labour processes of weaving, global textile production, and its colonial histories, through my disabled brown body. To do this, I build looms; out of my own body, out of reclaimed objects, out of the sea, and looms tethered and tensioned between people, to visualise embodied archives of collective trauma. My positionality from the Bangladeshi diaspora, confronted with the forecasted sea level rises, devastating floods, and climate grief in Bangladesh; I see water as a material and there being no distinction between land, water, and the body. My performances have harnessed the motif of the woven vessel as a symbol of resilience and to come to terms with eventual subaqueous grief and loss of ancestral land to being underwater.