Woven Consciousness

Contemporary Textile in Israel 

Textile is one of the main elements in our lives; it covers, protects, and ornaments our body, and fills the space in which we live, it is a shape and a pre-shape, a practical object such as clothing, furniture, space - and at the same time a sensorial transitional substance that flows endlessly, relating narratives and visual traditions and offering new aesthetic possibilities.

Textile is composed of a web of natural or man-made fibers created in a multitude of methods - weaving, knitting, tying, felting, compression, and more - some of which are as ancient as mankind and some are the cutting edge of the 21st century science.

Today, alongside the cotton, wool, straw, linen, silk, canvass and jute fibers one finds nylon, polyester, Lycra, metal, glass, steel and carbon fibers. Textile fuels the imagination of designers, artists, and scientists as it is flexible and durable, soft, rough, and two- and three-dimensional.

It combines the labor-intesive handmade endeavor and industrialized technology, incorporates time and memory, the history of mankind - both of the individual and the group. It offers never-ending vitality as it is based on molds, layers, patterns and rhythms and at the same time on removal, disintegration, and unraveling.

The scope of this exhibition is remarkable; it offers contemporary textile work in Israel, which has been flourishing in recent years despite the collapse of the local textile industry. This is by virtue of the advanced textile studies in Israel's higher education institutions, by virtue of the endeavor and success of independent textile designers who cooperate with companies and artists in Israel and abroad, and by virtue of the artists for whom textile is their main way of expressing poetics and fantasy.

The exhibit brings together the work of textile designers, visual artists, and multidisciplinary creators, reflecting the central part which textile plays in the search for new, rigorous, and revolutionary paths for expression and practical use in the world of design and art, and the way in which its boundaries are examined and breached from time to time. The exhibit offers ways of observing along time and space dimensions as these are perceived in textile, overt and covert ways of thinking about the social, political, and cultural aspects embodied in it, and theway in which textile is woven into our consciousness as both substance and abstraction.

Curator: Irena Gordon

Closes: June 8, 2014