A scrim (mesh fabric) is a lightweight, open-weave material used primarily in theatrical performances and veils. Depending on the lighting, the scrim can be visible or invisible, and it often serves as reinforcement for repairing damaged fabrics. Etel Adnan and Lynn Marie Kirby wrote “Always Thinking Like A Scrim.” Just as a scrim’s visibility changes with lighting, our experience of the world is shaped by multiple, often overlapping facets, like palimpsestic support and folds that hold.
From the pollution caused by mass consumption of textiles to the canvas stretched as an image, from the swaddling cloth in which we are wrapped at birth to the clothes we choose for burial, textiles serve as barometers of our lives. For this unfolding show, Shimmer explores the life cycle of textiles, delving deeply through the act of making. Textiles speak a language that crosses cultures and also goes beneath them, providing opportunities to discuss things that cannot be expressed in any other medium.
The exhibition draws inspiration from the rhythm of layering found in the many works you will see over two exhibitions: the first in March 2024 and the second in June 2024. These two parts are interfaced by early works by Hana Miletić, much like a scrim that provides a baseline for repairs, giving structure to fabric while remaining flexible to movement.
These early works by Hana Miletić recreate real-world encounters of daily and quick repairs, such as a side-view car mirror wrapped back together with green duct tape. Positioned 90 cm from the ground, the height of a car side mirror or window, these works reflect the social and cultural realities in which the artist herself operates.
Our interest in textiles originated from an interest in fashion and how dressing tracks the different moments of our lives. We are also intrigued by how clothing and adorning ourselves signifies our hopes, dreams, and intentions to ourselves and others. Dressing can serve to hide, make private, conceal from view, or transform us into someone else. The concept of costuming (etymologically related to ‘customs’) is deeply layered in the work of Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz, who have extensively used jewelry, sweaters, coveralls, period costumes, wigs, prosthetic makeup, leather, sequins, and chains. Costuming creates a character, fits or questions norms and standards.
Their work, “Wall Necklace (Otherworldly II),” exhibited at Shimmer, is a sculpture of architectural jewelry dressing Shimmer up. For the artists, chains are like wigs that, balancing between the technical and the decorative, have the ability to help us step in and out of worlds. They enable us to prop a foot over the edge of a custom and embody a new potential way of relating to one another.
The technical and the decorative are also present in the practice of Tenant of Culture, whose artworks are fashioned from the offcuts of fashion, draped in the in-between space of archaeology and commodities. Drawing from studies in fashion, Tenant of Culture recycles and reworks masses of fast fashion into intricately stitched artworks often embellished with elastic toggles, zippers, and brand labels. In “Dry Fit (Series)” (2022), the artwork blurs the boundary of the space through polyester hoods and collars, and water-repellent materials that repel rather than absorb. These works fold together the many lives and intentions of previous wearers into an architectural cut, a soft compilation of the many layers of how we signal to one another. The indexical history of the material is hard to define. These materials, made to look more or less the same, find a new resonance with our bodies through their reassemblage.
The artwork of Lotus L. Kang builds intimate material environments that are vibrant and fleshy. Known for her large-scale bolts of photographic film works that she “tans” in the sun, Kang’s installations can appear ruddy and burnished in high contrast with the cool steel fixtures and aluminum cast objects. Kang’s artworks often take on opposing positions to find balance between the inside and outside, intimate and expansive. All can be found in “Receiver Transmitter (Root)” (2023) at Shimmer. Poking from under a fragrant tatami mat is a red piece of construction bag, immediately recognizable as protective material found on construction sites and industrial zones such as the Rotterdam Port. The industrial material in Kang’s work is a recurring element in her sculpture installations. Pairing it with galvanized steel or aluminum cast fruits, vegetables, or roots (or are they intestines), the works hold a cultural memory woven in burlap sacks, woven tatami mat (for a single person)—a fabric for protection, memory in deep memory held in the gut.
A digital red piece of fabric floats into the frame of “What happens to the geographical borders when the land itself moves” by Cihad Caner. A red flag, a warning signal. Historically, the red flag on a ship means “no mercy,” but it is also a symbol of left-wing ideologies. For Caner, the flag is an empty representative of no nation as the narrator whispers the most common keywords gathered and scraped from 485 online news articles on the refugee and climate crises, both of which are inextricably linked.
Made between 2016 and 2017, the video connects the Syrian drought and how it became one of the major factors behind the country’s civil war. “What happens to the geographical borders when the land itself moves” is as relevant today as it was then. Where basic human needs turn into commodities, into capital, into speculation, and into war. Systems of no mercy.
Daniel Giles has been working with the patterns of behavior enforced by racial, economic, social, and cultural supremacy that are still present today, often found on textile patterns and architectural sites. To make his “Untitled (White Paintings),” Giles has been exploring the repetitive and exhaustive work of making and its explicit and long-term effect on the body. Through the repetitive actions of building layers of floral textile motifs—think of the folding, refolding, and folding again of the arabesque—it appears as though Giles has begun to both uncover and emerge from the surface. Sifted, ever softer in graphite powder, the surfaces take on a velvet quality of flocking, of thin layers that require the audience to move backwards and forwards past the work. As such, the efforts of the viewer are destabilized, with the motifs appearing and disappearing based on where your body finds itself and, to that extent, where in the folds of the motif we locate each other.
Participating artists:
Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz, Cihad Caner, Daniel Giles, Hana Miletić, Lotus L. Kang, and Tenant of Culture
Curated by
Eloise Sweetman, Jason Hendrik Hansma
at SHIMMER
until August 11, 2024