INTERVIEW WITH RAISA KABIR

Available in French on ACA Project (Asian Contemporary Art)’s website here

By invitation from Ricko Leung, conducted in October 2023, by Amandine Vabre Chau

Asia Now art fair has opened its ninth edition in Paris from the 20th to the 22nd of October. I had the pleasure of interviewing Raisa Kabir, an interdisciplinary artist and weaver from Manchester participating in the international Majhi Art Residency. The artist was part of a group exhibition at Asia Now titled ‘Between Plant and Thread, Blue and Purple’ curated by guest curator Ricko Leung as part of the fair’s Special Projects.

Raisa Kabir studies the politics of textile and its geographical implications especially related to borders, migration, labour and the body. I had the opportunity to dive into the artist’s study of archives, colonial legacies and textile histories, resulting in a fruitful and fertile conversation.

INTERVIEW

Raisa Kabir - ‘Utterances: Our vessels for the stories unspoken. Subaqueous violence. Sea. Ocean...’ (2016-present) - Installation shot at the 2023 Liverpool Biennal - Courtesy of the artist

Amandine Vabre Chau: I first wanted to ask you some general questions about how you came to where you are now. When and where did your interest in weaving come from?

Raisa Kabir: My family is from Bangladesh and I grew up in Manchester in the UK. My mum was a social worker, it was very rare at the time, I think, for women to be working. She worked for a women’s refuge, supporting people suffering from domestic violence. I think at heart my mother is an artist, but she’s always spent her time, you know, working for migrant rights, for social justice issues. At home, the house was always filled with textiles, beautiful textiles, that my aunt had made or things she collected from Bangladesh. She just used the house like a canvas. And my aunt was an embroiderer, and she crocheted all of these things.

I had an interest in architecture, which I was originally going to study. I still think it is very relevant to the way my practice looks at space and how architectural structures are very related to weaving. But I didn’t really realise that I could use textiles as a way or medium to ask these deeper questions around our society, migration, diaspora, partition, the remnants of colonialism… So I never really looked at weaving. But I was very into sculptural textiles, the likes of embroidery, quilting, printing, dyeing- all kinds of things. It wasn’t until I did my textile design degree that I first encountered weaving. I’d seen weaving in museums and textile artworks at the Whitworth Gallery in Manchester, and I saw these amazing textile artists that were using political frameworks to do with gender, class or migration. And I thought ‘Oh, you can make textile as art’, I didn’t realise that. And then once I started weaving, I became very connected to the fact that this is a very ancient form of making. It’s present in all human cultures. It is a practice that connects you to a lineage of makers and producers. Also, textiles are about survival. It is kind of what makes us human. We all need it for survival, shelter, clothing, but also for domestic interiors. It’s also about engineering. Weaving are our first structures, our first houses were woven pieces that were made out of bamboo or palm leaves. They’re our first kind of architecture. I also relate textile weaving as a way to think about how we create and make, and remake, our worlds. Not only just within the domestic sphere, but with our entire way of relating to each other internationally, and also -fundamentally- from the very beginning of time.

Raisa Kabir ‘House Made of Tin (A socially distanced weaving performance)’ 2020 – Film still

Raisa Kabir – ‘The art and language of weaving resistance’ 2021 - Courtesy of the artist

Raisa Kabir – ‘The art and language of weaving resistance’ 2021

Let us talk about space a little bit more maybe since we are also discussing borders and connection. I was thinking about your piece ‘The art and language of weaving resistance’.

Yes. This piece is about textile archives. I also see weaving and textile artworks as the heritage of specific geographical regions and spaces. There’s a phenomenon around how patterns are claimed by nations. For example, Jamdani is a historical type of weaving using very fine muslin cotton that won over the Mughal courts, but it dates back to even before Mughal Dhaka and has roots in Persia. You also have these very distinct geometrical designs that are rooted in Islamic decorative arts while woven in Bengal, in India, and in Bangladesh. Before this region was divided, aforementioned weaving happened in the whole surrounding area. With partition, you suddenly have Dhaka muslin and Jamdani, the latter being of a very Bangladeshi identity. At the same time they are also woven on the other side of the partition in West Bengal. Because textiles don’t suddenly break when you make a border, just as people don’t suddenly break when you make a border. You have these intertwined languages, and it’s the same with the intertwined textile heritages. Those patterns are centuries old and have moved before these borders even existed. There’s a lot to be said about how textiles become bound up with ideas of nation-states and nationhood, and who has been denied legitimacy.

And this is also interesting when thinking of Paisley in Scotland. The Jacquard looms are industrial machine-looms that were created to imitate hand-weaving and the very beautiful hand-work of Kani weaving originating from Kashmir. This machine became used to copy the designs of the Buta. Then this pattern becomes owned by this other industry that is completely devoided and broken away from the origins of the indigenous cloth and its techniques, its women workers, its land. When you supplant these designs in this different region -where it’s imitated- it becomes this other thing, highly manufactured and mass produced. It’s what we call Paisley. I talk about that double ownership and I dispute it, because it’s not right when it erases those indigenous connections.

After partition there was an option to go to the UK where there was a shortage of labour after the Second World War. They needed people and called out to their empire, their colonies. So you get these areas- specifically where these textile techniques come from- that are particularly affected by the borders created, whose people ended up coming to work in these UK factories. Then factor in the East India Company. They shift from taking raw cotton to the UK (sorting it, carding it, industrially processing it, weaving it, then exporting it back) to using enslaved Africans, forced to work in plantations in the Americas (we’re thinking the American South, Brazil, and also the Caribbean). This cotton, being picked through enslaved labour, is then being sent to Manchester, Preston, Bolton and all of these northern mill towns, where I’m from. Then it’s being spun and woven by working class people in the north. Afterwards, it’s exported again to buy more enslaved people, to trade for spices, for indigo, as well as to sell back to India. You therefore have this whole history of diaspora the last 50 to 60 years of people coming to the north of the UK to Rochdale, Blackburn, Preston, Oldham, Burnley, Bradford; all these textile mills where people from South Asia, from these partition lines, were going to.

To go back to the piece ‘The art and language of weaving resistance’ that you mention, it is about textile archives and who gets knowledge over claiming certain regions and certain techniques. I did a residency in Blackburn, Lancashire, where there’s a big South Asian community. I was looking at these archives in the Harris Museum, in Preston, where they have the John Forbes Watson volumes. It’s an 18 volume set of fabric sample books titled Textile Manufactures of India, all assembled by Watson in 1866. He was also appointed director of the India Museum by the East India Company. These books are basically trade booklets where they take textiles from every single region in India, then use them as a template to copy these designs which in turn become integrated into British design schools and British culture. These were sent to all these centres of British textile manufacturing towns. I’d never seen an English book from 1866 mentioning Sylhet, where a lot of Bangladeshis in Lancashire come from – And I thought… I don’t think people know that these archives are of their language and their heritage with their textile artwork in this museum. The textiles in these books were also cut up into small squares, kind of butchered like a partition, you know? So that work is about the uncut cloth, about how these textiles became archives. They become these talismans. I wouldn’t say portals, but maybe? They are a record of a time and place, of a space. And they’ve also travelled just as much as the histories of people who travelled between these regions. The piece references a lot of the colours and borders, also my mother’s saris. And the text that’s woven in, is the title ‘the art and language of weaving resistance’ in Bangla, it’s encoded in the cloth. It’s this uncut record about these multiple geographies that you move between, but also about the material histories that move within and relate to people, place and language.

Raisa Kabir ‘Build me a loom off of your back and your stomach’ – Courtesy of the artist

Thank you so much for your response, it’s very enlightening. The word ‘portal’ caught my attention, it appears as if you’re talking about records of time. Fabric and cotton, all these materials moving –and being moved- across the world and back. I find that there is a discussion with liminality in your work that’s translated from this. There are in-between spaces, connecting spaces or even third spaces. To me, fabric seems like an intermediary, even a space in itself in your art. Hence the relevance of ‘portal’. It feels like you’re activating histories and places all at once!

I had a question about your work ‘Build me a loom off of your back and stomach’. I’m interested in how you use both your body and the machine at the same time. One interacting with the other, connected and almost on the same footing. I can’t help but think of possible associations such as: does the body equate the machine? Or perhaps, better phrased, does the body relate to the machine as a production site ?

Thank you for your question. This piece was part of the Beyond Borders exhibition which was showing textile artists from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh. It showed me dancing with the loom. For me it was about dance and diaspora. Also, this loom being a metaphor for the machine and for the exploitation of bodies as machines; because our bodies are not machines. I have another performance where I build a loom in a 10 hour performance titled ‘The body is a site of production: resist, resist, resist’. The performance is me hammering the loom together, making the loom, working in the loom and then weaving with it.

I would say this work is also me looking at disability and what it means to be a disabled artist. But also what does it mean to be anyone who is resisting the ideas of endless production? What if we don’t fit into the system of being productive in the way that capitalist society requires us to be? We have to work in order to survive and meet our very basic needs so what happens when you’re disabled and can’t work in the way that you’re being forced to? And these questions are also layered with how the body of the craft labourer is valued when it’s in South Asia or Vietnam, Bangladesh, China, Taiwan, compared to when it is in Europe or America. How we value craft itself as something that is of the body. Textiles are of the body, they are of the land, and they are of the person. Especially when we make textiles by hand. It’s of your energy, your movement and your rhythm. Me dancing with the loom, it’s linking this production with the body.

When we look at beautiful textiles in the museum, we see these beautiful objects. We don’t see the labour. We don’t see the person that had to make them. They don’t get named or credited, and their records were never kept. We also don’t really see weaving or embroidery that’s done to that standard anymore so we fetishise that while never bringing the body into place. This is where my work shifts between beauty and violence, or beauty and heaviness. It becomes a metaphor for the invisiblised, globalised labour that is funding and running and churning the machine of consumption for the rest of the world.

Regarding “Gather your spools, let your hair down for me. Gently. Here. Undo”, which is both an installation and a video if I am not mistaken, we can see you standing in the middle of a field then seated and weaving. Threads are all around, then we suddenly meet your gaze when you look up at the camera, staring. This led me to question the position you grant the audience in your work. Whether you consider them an accomplice, a voyeur, a partner, a witness, or someone you’re in conversation with. Especially when I think back to ‘Build me a loom off of your back and your stomach’ where you’re in an institutional place compared to a field. I’m thinking about the gaze, reciprocal or not, of people witnessing you work.

Definitely. I have a lot of performance pieces, some of them recorded with videos, some with photographs. ‘Gather your spools […]’ was filmed as a performance. The looks were very intentional. Sometimes when I perform I don’t acknowledge the audience at all, at times I don’t even need anyone to see me. Sometimes you need a performance, sometimes you need an audience. My piece ‘You and I are more alike’, which is one of my favourites, was done with different kinds of publics and a loom was built between two people. It’s about this idea of shared, inherited, trauma over time and space, and the solidarity between struggles across the world for emancipation; while also looking specifically at queer women of colour. With ‘Build me a loom off of your back and stomach’- sometimes performances are a way of healing for me. I don’t necessarily need an audience, I might just need to do it. It’s a way to heal through some research or history, often related to parts of my own history or body, but also connected to this wider world and others.

Going back to ‘Gather your spools’, it was specifically about Paisley and Kashmiri woven textiles. Regarding the audience -since you mentioned the word ‘accomplice’- I think with that performance it was an invitation to ask people ‘how do you view the craft labourer?’. Is there this romanticisation? How do you distance yourself from the product that someone makes? And then this idea of what their labour is, or who they are. The performance obviously makes this kind of fake romanticisation of this person that could be in South Asia, but is in fact in a field in London. It’s about the pastiches that happen when we think about South Asian craft and weaving, it becomes this tangled mass that isn’t interrogated enough by this- as you say- accomplice, who is the audience, who is maybe the other side of this history, this sort of consumer perhaps.

‘Build me a loom off of you back and stomach’ was inside the institution and there was an audience when I was performing. I first danced with the loom then created one between my feet. It was this very slow, intimate, setting. Everyone was very far away from me, too scared to come in. So I sat down and I invited them to come closer, to be in this with me, to be part of this. They then gathered around as I was stitching the soles of my feet with a needle, pricking the skin, holding the tension by pulling the threads- it could tear, it could bleed– there was this pressure in the room, and everyone was holding it together. I had to encourage them to come and be my witness. A lot of my work places my body to make it visible, make the labour visible. I often find that with my textile works, they need some kind of activation, some performing that references these violent histories which need to be embodied. And yes, at times need to be witnessed while at others, I only need to be there for myself.

Continuing on that and thinking about ‘Build me a loom[…]’ with the stitching between your feet, but also ‘Gather your spools [..]’ where your weaving is intertwined with your hair – Would you consider your practice to be a prolongation of yourself or your body? Or maybe consider your body as a portal?

I think I use my body as a portal to create the bridges of solidarity between myself and the struggles in history that I’m referencing. I’m not Kashmiri or Punjabi but I can use my body as a doorway to pinpoint subjects in the map or in the work. After all, it is me, my body, and I am doing that work using it as this material to connect with the research that I’m making. I found that after a few years of this now, it is harder to do just because it takes so much out of you. So I’m not sure how much longer I can sustain this.

So sorry to cut you off but when you say difficult, do you mean physically or mentally? Maybe both?

I think physically. Mentally, yes. But more physically. And I have found ways to do that. I try to film for a longer time, smaller movements rather than things that are very short and intense, those are very draining. A recent performance I did was called ‘House Full of Water’. We built a boat sculpture with a bamboo structure in Fort Aguada in Goa. I would collect sea water then bring it up to the forteress, a colonial 17th century prison, and climb a precarious ladder to pour water from above into these Indian water pots attached to a pulley, with a stone and some rice hooks. Suddenly the water would drop and then fill the boat making this inside out flooding. I would just keep on repeating it again and again with fresh water then sea water. I also built a loom between the bars of the prison cells. I’m using a lot of the trading materials like indigo or jutes that were coming through Fort Aguada. It was a place where the Portuguese colonial fleet would restock their fresh water for the next six months, then go back to Europe. It was a very strategic place. So my body becomes an actor, but also an embodied portal. It’s transplanting, making the body present and visible, visceral in connection to the work.

I also wanted to ask a bit more about your research. Going back to ‘The art and language of weaving resistance’ for example, that stemmed from two years of study around, and about, the volumes titled ‘Textile manufacturers of India’ that you mentioned. Whenever I hear you speak, I find it incredible the amount of knowledge that you have garnered. I was wondering if you could talk a bit more about how you start your research, and if you think you have a research-based practice?

Yeah, it’s definitely very research heavy to the point where I worry that it’s gone so far and the idea got lost. It’s the culmination of years of reading, visiting spaces and meeting people. A lot of the knowledge has been shared with me, I give a lot of credit to the weavers that I’ve worked with in Mexico and Bangladesh, incredible sources of knowledge. Generally, I think something will peak my interest. Often it will start with museums and archives, encounters with items that were taken as colonial loot. I want to ask who made this? Why is this here? How is this described? How is this textile being presented by this white curator? What are they not telling me? What is it that I seek to know fully? There frequently is a counter-narrative. So my research isn’t just repeating what the museum says. It’s about what we are not mentioning. And it comes from years of going to lectures and having people listen to, perhaps, these textile curators from a Western European perspective telling me my own history; there are these gaps- I have an understanding that there is an anti-colonial version of all of this textile history.

It’s also about trying to answer the question of the scale. When you start reading- especially these reports from the East India Company- how they talk about land, their practice of geography; when you start excavating that, there is this huge sense of the scale. I think sometimes we aren’t able to confront it. We can’t imagine the scale of this production and consumption today. We haven’t been to the factories, we are so divorced from the modes of production. There are places in the world that are literally just cities of factories because that’s what the world demands and we turn away. When I say ‘we’ I mean people who are really benefiting from this. My research therefore wants to explore these questions and I want to find all avenues of these underlying and hidden stories. How they relate to people and their links to materials.

Absolutely. Thank you. Second to last question ! There seems to be a lot of talk about community and care in the art world at the moment, more than there was before. A rise on these subject matters, like there was with identity politics. I have always been interested in these topics, especially when relating to the Asian population and diaspora however I can’t help but think about its eventual commodification or fall into neglect after its brief moment of glory. I was wondering if you’re ever wary of this happening or if you disagree with that statement? It seems like, at times, people throw « care » around like a buzzword which undermines artists that have worked for a very long time on these subjects.

Yes, definitely. And we see this time and time again. There will be a surge, a parlance that appears in the art world that they’re catching onto which becomes this zeitgeist. As you said, there has been decades of people doing specific groundwork that has nothing to do with the art world. I would say I can only welcome the industry trying to be more human and treat its artists with care and respect. I’ve often had to call people out, especially working as a disabled artist. We know that lots of people are not paid or treated well, we’re not as unionised as we could be…And yeah, I am worried that people are using it as a buzzword without doing the structural reconditioning of how they operate. We are artworkers. There is labour. I have to say that I have encountered people really putting this into practice, I’ve been on both sides. I also know that it will take a much longer shift for that to go across the whole sector and I really hope for its longevity. People have been taken around COVID and suddenly care, sickness, and disability were in the limelight. I do think there are shifts, but I get a sense that most people will want to carry on as normal. That maybe this is just a moment and not something that is structural which means it’s leaving people behind that cannot re-enter these spaces after this brief exposure. I’m very careful about who I work with for this very reason. It’s not just about making space for disabled people. It’s about whatever we can do to expand access to benefit everyone.

I couldn’t agree more. I have a very last question and then you’re free to go ! You’re currently in an art residency at Majhi and I know that you are to present work at the end of it, which is to be shown at the upcoming Asia Now Art Fair. I was wondering if you could tell me a bit more as to how you came to participate in that, and what you’re currently preparing?  

Yeah, the Durjoy Bangladesh Foundation (DBF) invited me. I had a piece that I was just starting and I thought it would work really well with this year’s Asia Now theme, which is textile arts. As you said, I’m very research based. At the moment it’s been about combining silk production in Bengal -that was implemented by the East India Company- with me looking at indigo and trade textiles. I’ve been observing this technique which is called Lampas in France. The word refers to a Jacquard silk weaving textile but the actual technique does not originate from France, though the term does refer to a distinct fabric. As a technique, you could see it all along the silk road with a lot of Muslim weavers in southern Spain, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, India and China. In India it was called Kimkhwab. There are lots of wonderful records around these beautiful cloths of gold made in Central Asia. So you see this travelling history of knowledge, technique, people and material. I’m looking at all the indigenous names of how it’s recognized.

The weaving I’m currently making incorporates gold and silk. It’s intertwined with the history of the Bengal mutiny -which is also known as the Indian rebellion- that sparked up a lot of anti-colonial resistance. A painting by Edward Armitage documents this uprising from the British angle. You see the personification of Britannia slaying a tiger, the latter a representation of Bengal fighting for emancipation. At the bottom of the canvas we see slain white children. This gives Britain reason to put down this beast portrayed as a wild creature out of control.  

I’m evoking this painting, this framing of resistance in histories, these pockets of facts or moments in time. My weaving is a reinterpretation of that. It shows an Iranian Mughal painting where an Asian man is breastfeeding a tiger. The latter mauling the man, while at the same time being fed and killed by him. There’s this deeper questioning: it’s never actually about what religion, or whose creed, ethnicity -anything like that- It’s about who holds the power. This painting is about this tussle between this man with the knife and this tiger. It’s about these different dynamics at play. My work is an invitation to come closer, to have a conversation.

Amandine Vabre Chau with Asian Contemporary Art - Interview with Raisa Kabir - October 2023