IYP X Metropolitan Organisation of Museums of Visual Arts (MOMus), Thessaloniki

What information do textiles store? What stories can fabrics tell about their origin, their meaning, their use, their particular material and their immaterial claims? Under which economic conditions and social structures have patterns and formal languages developed over time? How do they change when transferred across cultures? How can artists expand our understanding of textiles? Which ideas and practices do they appropriate, transpose, invent or revive?

These questions run through the exhibition “The Event of a Thread”, which is presented at MOMus-Experimental Center for the Arts (Warehouse B1, Thessaloniki Port), from 5 March to 5 June 2022 (EXTENDED UNTIL 21 AUGUST 2022) and is the new version of the original exhibition produced by ifa (Institut fűr Auslandbezienhungen). This new version, next to a core of works by 14 artists, enriches the narratives related to the textile universe through the works of nine additional artists from Greece and abroad. The exhibition is the result of the collaboration between MOMus-Experimental Center for the Arts with ifa, with the support of Goethe-Institut Thessaloniki.

In textiles, tradition meets the present, the arts meet crafts, local forms of knowledge meet world practices. Fabrics reflect the changing conditions of production and the invisible context of globalization in their material form. At the same time, they provide information on local forms of expression, experience and social practice.

In 1965 the Bauhaus artist Ani Albers described the “event of a thread” as something polyline, with no beginning and no end. Today, the vision of intertwining sensibilities and practices from across the world to form new patterns celebrating artistic research on the one craft that, more than others, unites all cultures, runs through the exhibition. From the Bauhaus to contemporary artistic creation, and from industrial to cultural history, the exhibition gives a new dimension to the stories of the thread, approaching it as an event that takes place on a material, spiritual, visual and economic level and can form complex constructions of any kind.

An exhibition coproduced by MOMus-Experimental Center for the Arts with ifa (Institut fűr Auslandsbeziehungen) and supported by Goethe-Institut Thessaloniki