INTERVIEW WITH RAISA KABIR
TRANSDISCIPLINARY ARTIST AND WEAVER
Available in French on ACA Project (Asian Contemporary Art)’s website here
By invitation from Ricko Leung, conducted in October 2023, by Amandine Vabre Chau
Asia Now art fair has opened its ninth edition in Paris, which will be up from the 20th to the 22nd of October. I had the pleasure of interviewing Raisa Kabir, an interdisciplinary artist and weaver from Manchester participating in the international Majhi Art Residency. The artist was part of a group exhibition at Asia Now titled ‘Between Plant and Thread, Blue and Purple’ curated by guest curator Ricko Leung for the fair’s Special Projects.
Raisa Kabir studies the politics of textile and its geographical implications especially related to borders, migration, labour and the body.
INTERVIEW
Raisa Kabir - ‘Utterances: Our vessels for the stories unspoken. Subaqueous violence. Sea. Ocean...’ (2016-present) - Installation shot at the 2023 Liverpool Biennal - Courtesy of the artist
Amandine Vabre Chau: I first wanted to ask you some general questions about how you came to where you are now. When and where did your interest in weaving come from?
Raisa Kabir: My family is from Bangladesh and I grew up in Manchester in the UK. My mum was a social worker, it was very rare at the time, I think, for women to be working. She worked for a women’s refuge, supporting people suffering from domestic violence. I think at heart my mother is an artist, but she’s always spent her time, you know, working for migrant rights, for social justice issues. At home, the house was always filled with textiles, beautiful textiles, that my aunt had made or things she collected from Bangladesh. She just used the house like a canvas. And my aunt was an embroiderer, and she crocheted all of these things.
I had an interest in architecture, which I was originally going to study. I still think it is very relevant to the way my practice looks at space and how architectural structures are very related to weaving. But I didn’t really realise that I could use textiles as a way or medium to ask these deeper questions around our society, migration, diaspora, partition, the remnants of colonialism… So I never really looked at weaving. But I was very into sculptural textiles, the likes of embroidery, quilting, printing, dyeing- all kinds of things. It wasn’t until I did my textile design degree that I first encountered weaving. I’d seen weaving in museums and textile artworks at the Whitworth Gallery in Manchester, and I saw these amazing textile artists that were using political frameworks to do with gender, class or migration. And I thought ‘Oh, you can make textile as art’, I didn’t realise that. And then once I started weaving, I became very connected to the fact that this is a very ancient form of making. It’s present in all human cultures. It is a practice that connects you to a lineage of makers and producers. Also, textiles are about survival. It is kind of what makes us human. We all need it for survival, shelter, clothing, but also for domestic interiors. It’s also about engineering. Weaving are our first structures, our first houses were woven pieces that were made out of bamboo or palm leaves. They’re our first kind of architecture. I also relate textile weaving as a way to think about how we create and make, and remake, our worlds. Not only just within the domestic sphere, but with our entire way of relating to each other internationally, and also -fundamentally- from the very beginning of time.
Raisa Kabir ‘House Made of Tin (A socially distanced weaving performance)’ 2020 – Film still
About weaving and textile—even when we talk about clothes and structures—it’s something that can protect you or create a border. It depends on how you use it. It seems the manner in which you use textile is similar to a network. I remember seeing your piece ‘House of Tin’ at the Whitechapel Gallery where a literal network was formed between various participants in a collaborative performance of yours. That was absolutely beautiful.
Oh, thank you so much. And I guess this is why I sometimes call myself a weaver that doesn’t really weave very conventionally. I’m very much concerned with the structural quality, as you said, the networks, that I create. It’s the tension that we have with each other; our links between each culture, each person, each kind of history; how we relate to each other and how we’re connected to each other. I’m interested in weaving as the molecule of the very beginning of time. If you reference Donna Haraway, she talks about string theory, about how at the beginning of everything there were lots of strings. And when these strings interlace together, they create new things. So at the very beginning of everything, there is a kind of weaving, an interlacing, an interrelational network that is happening. As you say, ‘House made of Tin’ was this physical manifestation and visualisation of how as systems, humans -also non-humans-, are all interconnected with each other. And there are these tensions, these lines of tension as well as psychic threads that hold us together. A lot of my work references that. This diasporic connection to places and lands that are very far away, that you are emotionally and psychically attuned to. But there are no words for that, and there is perhaps no physical time, maybe we cannot return. This is why textiles are so powerful, because they are the containers of so much knowledge, history, heritage, family and home. I always say that textiles are the artwork of displaced people. Because when you have to leave, what do you take? Maybe your blankets and your textiles to wrap what you need inside them. There is a thread there. My work is about people who have had to leave. Specifically about partition in South Asia and migration to the West, with references to partition borders in Punjab, Kashmir, Bangladesh ; Sylhet and the South east Borderlands. All these areas, these borders- as you said: textiles are connectors. You can use it as a medium to explore all sides of these topics.
Raisa Kabir – ‘The art and language of weaving resistance’ 2021 - Courtesy of the artist
Raisa Kabir – ‘The art and language of weaving resistance’ 2021
Full interview available here
Amandine Vabre Chau with Asian Contemporary Art - Interview with Raisa Kabir - October 2023