Textile – Territory – Text

Mana Contemporary is pleased to present Textile – Territory – Text. It is comprised of video installations, animation, painting, photography, and sculpture. It will be exhibited in 2017 at the Umm El-Fahem Art Gallery in a larger format.

Cloth and clothing embody our being in the world not just in the present, but throughout the passing of time. They wrap our existence in every passing moment, and outlive us. Textile is embedded in the manner in which we perceive ourselves and the Other; the feminine and the masculine; the private and the public. It holds both decorative and sensual imagery, as well as traditional and groundbreaking technological development. By being so daily and intimate—yet symbolic and grand—textile presents issues of gender, belonging, exclusion, exaltation, abjection, purity, and sanctity.

The exhibition examines ways in which artists in Israel today use textile for confronting issues of identity, language, and boundaries of body and space. Textile in art presents a multiplicity, one that evades definition, and at the same time, continues to point back to its sources, processes, and techniques. The exhibition takes in this multiplicity and through it, presents the encoding of social norms, of historical and contemporary conflicts, of personal and collective narratives—always political, always poetic.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.