Kristina Benjocki: At sunset we retreat once again, up the hill, to where we can watch the skeins of water reflect colours we've never seen before
IKOB – Museum für Zeitgenössiche Kunst, 2022Kristina Benjocki’s work explores the political mechanisms of forgetting and remembering in the context of former Eastern and Western Europe, and materializes through installation, audio, textile and film. Engaging with the local history of the cloth industry in Eupen as well as her own biographical attachments to textile production, the exhibition at IKOB is a poetic interrogation of how textiles and the very practice of weaving intersect with technological progress, political histories, and the construction of cultural identity.
The central work of the exhibition is Tableaux VI-VII, La composition (2022), a new installation of large-scale, two-sided tapestries. Using her own loom to weave these rugs by hand, the artist reproduces knowledge and movements that have been employed, mostly by women, since ancient times. The patterns are based on a series of grid drawings for rugs woven in the Pirot kilim tradition, manufactured in the artist’s home country of Serbia. They can be traced back to pre-Islamic Ottoman rule in the Balkans and were later used to construct a post-Communist national identity, pointing to how textiles are intimately intertwined with migration, trade, and political power.
The importance of weaving in the historical development of technological advancement is the starting point for the sound piece included in the exhibition by composer and musician Seamus Cater, developed in collaboration with the artist and responding to the individual tapestries of Tableaux VI-VII, La composition. The one hour (looped) sound installation and a series of six drawings are exhibited together. The loom can be considered as the first computer, as it allows its user to control a sequence of operations, an essential mechanism for developing computing hardware. Following this logic, the composer arranged a quote by the British mathematician Ada Lovelace about the ‘Analytical Engine’, an early computational device which she helped develop together with Charles Babbage, into a song.
Listen to the song here.
Benjocki employs methods similar to those of an archaeologist, with a particular interest in the overlooked, the hidden, and the repressed. The story of human evolution often focuses on hard materials such as stone, bronze or iron. But without perishable materials woven with thread, produced mostly through women’s labour, civilization is unthinkable. Up to this day we depend on clothing, furnishings, and fabric of all kinds to survive and function. Following the threads that coil and twist themselves through history, Benjocki’s work complicates the frequently subordinated position of textiles and urges us to take a closer look at how they are part of the very fabric of our lives.
Generously supported by the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands and the Mondriaan Fonds.
To view and download publication designed by Karoline Świeżyński with a text by Christel Vesters, click here.
Photography: Lola Pertsowsky
The public programme for this exhibition included a four-part artist film programme and a guided walk through Eupen. Click for more information,