• Shows
  • Feb 04, 2022

Undoing the “Threads of Time” at No 20 Arts

Detailed view of YANG-EN HUME’s Her Shroud, 2019, digital prints on organza and voile and embroidery thread, 90 × 80 cm, at "Threads of Time," No 20 Arts, London, 2021. All images courtesy the artist and No 20 Arts. 

Embroidered surfaces, wispy lace, delicate fibers; there was something feminine about the historically domestic crafts spotlighted in “Threads of Time,” a group exhibition featuring emerging artists of Asian descent at London’s No 20 Arts. But there was nothing gentle about their excavation of peripheral memories unraveled onto provocatively tactile surfaces: labyrinthine tangles of thread, hairy rugs, piercing stitches—and rightfully so. These works intend to unsettle, not in spite of, but through the familiarity of their medium. As they agitate the visitor, so does the dark underbelly of the hidden labor associated in their making: feminine, indentured, but therefore, and above all, consigned to the margins of history.

Australian-Singaporean artist Yang-En Hume’s installation, Mausoleum (2020), was the show’s nucleus, its hauntingly translucent organza netting draped across the floor. The textile tomb enshrines stitched portraits of women—some whole, others violently chopped. Frustration is palpable as one attempts, and fails, to identify these anonymous faces. Hume scoured these images from flea markets, home to domestic debris, in defiance of museums’ rigid taxonomic codes, which leave these personal artifacts out of official histories. Mausoleum revels in the unorganized chaos of its found objects, revering archives rendered too frivolous to be institutionally acquired, restored, and conserved.

Installation view of "Threads of Time," No 20 Arts, London, 2021. 

Needlework has historically and globally been devalued as mere decorative or domestic craft; it is “women’s work” passed from mother to daughter, or conducted by Third World women in textile factories. Its reclaiming by contemporary artists is thus both record and resistance. Hume interrogates the dismissal of domestic, implicitly female, artistic labor in Palimpsest and Her Shroud (both 2019), where digital scans of handwoven textiles are printed on fabric and layered as a translucent curtain. In Palimpsest, a piece of lace wraps itself in the form of a bound, corseted torso, implying suffocation (or beautification?), while a monogrammed handkerchief in Her Shroud bears the ornate imprint of its owner’s initial. Their ghostly materiality implies how memories of women and their labor borne in these wispy voiles are as prone to being windswept as they are forgotten.

Fijian-Indian-Australian artist Shivanjani Lal retraces the routes that British ships took when transporting her ancestors from India to Fiji as indentured sugarcane field laborers on a series of embroidered maps, Yaad Karo [1879-1920]: Empire Edition (2021). Lining the gallery’s back wall, the maps’ scale, seriality, and clinical exactitude are horrific, as they chart this exploitation annually from 1879 to 1920. Puncturing through paper, Lal’s red backstitches onto these atlases are a literal mapping of colonialist ruptures across time and space: displaced communities, exploited labor, and the legacy of identity crises felt by later generations born into the diaspora. While loose embroidery thread trailing blood-red rivers across the globe is admittedly on-the-nose, it is effective in conveying that along with histories of colonialism is always a history of loss.

Detail view of SHIVANJANI LAL’s Yaad Karo [1879-1920]: Empire Edition, 2021, brown paper from Marine Lines, Bombay and red kite thread from Byculla, Bombay, dimensions variable, "Threads of Time," No 20 Arts, London, 2021. 

No 20 Arts contributed to this resuscitation of empire’s buried memories. The exhibition plan listed the origins of Lal’s installation materials, acknowledging labor communities: brown paper from Marine Lines, Bombay, red kite thread from Byculla, Bombay, sugar sacks from Sigatoka Town, Fiji, among others. Although still incomplete, this perceptive approach suggests the beginnings of reparations needed to be mete out for future healing to take place.

Although not as heavily featured, South Korean artists Sunghoon Yang and Seungwon Jung’s works play against each other in a corner of the gallery as they track the passage of time through craft-making practices. The moon jars’ faded edges in Yang’s 2015 paintings, Memory I and II, recall the imprint of the numerous hands that shaped and traded these clay collectibles, ergo recording the temporal movements they have endured. Similarly, as a hand-knotted tapestry rug based on a digitally-generated pattern of rock depositions, the layers of Jung’s Ductile Deformation (2021) accumulate and age along with the Earth like a physical, geological archive. Yang and Jung materialized time’s ability to dissolve and tarnish objects and memories, accentuating how temporal distance may have further concealed the obscured narratives underlined by Hume and Lal.

SUNGHOON YANG, Memory I, 2015, oil on canvas, 130 × 130 cm. 

“Threads of Time” is an extortion to read against the grain of accepted histories. In its cathartic excavation of buried memories, the exhibition reckons with hegemonic, institutional methods of remembering, from the museum to empire. Here comes the uncomfortable question: do we force ourselves to choose blissful ignorance or “remember” anew?

“Threads of Time” is on view at No 20 Arts, London, from December 10, 2021 until February 26, 2022.


Related Articles