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Ivana Ivković is featured in the group exhibition “The Event of a Thread: Global Narratives in Textiles”, which opens on 5th of April at Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina in Novi Sad. The exhibition is organised by ifa – Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, the Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina, Novi Sad and the Goethe-Institute in Belgrade.

Curated by Susanne Weiß, Inka Gressel (ifa – Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen) and Sanja Kojić Mladenov (Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina), the exhibition highlights the multiple complex ways in which the participating artists work with textiles. They link personal and aesthetic narratives with the social and economic configuration of a globalized world. In 1965, Bauhaus artist Anni Albers described “the event of a thread” as something multilinear, without beginning or end: more broadly, it signifies constant scope to rethink relations and to restructure connections and contexts.

The artist Judith Raum developed “The Bauhaus Space” for the exhibition, an visual archive and installation dedicated to the history of the weaving workshop of Bauhaus Dessau.. We encounter rewoven fabrics and historic materials in a specially designed display (design: Jakob Kirch; architecture: S.T.I.F.F.) that unfolds its extraordinary success story in six chapters.

Every part of the world can attest the complex inscription of textiles into cultural and industrial history. In a political climate marked by detachment and cruelty, textiles hold the power to evoke reminiscences of earlier heartfelt humane times, to remind us how precious handcrafts are, to call to compassion and solidarity. Hence, in cooperation with local contemporary artists, the main body of the exhibition is complemented by artworks that create new narratives relevant to the textile in the local context and their engaged response to the various oppression forms, systematic but also interpersonal.

Building on the concept of the original exhibition, the Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina also exhibits works of art by the artists from Serbia, who deal with the specific socio-political context of their own environment. They emphasize the importance of emancipatory practice, activism and community as important characteristics of the use of textiles in local historical and contemporary artistic practice. The exhibition will feature works from the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina, the National Museum of Užice and the “Atelier 61” from Novi Sad.