The international exhibition "A Single Thread Event: Global Narratives in Textiles", organized by the Institute for International Cultural Affairs (IFA) and the MSU-Skopje.

Curators: Suzan Weiss, Inka Gressel and Jovanka Popova 

The exhibition will open on Tuesday, May 28, starting at 8 p.m.

Textiles are at the heart of the traveling exhibition organized by IFA, focusing on questions: What meanings and messages are inherent in fabrics? What is their cultural significance? How can they be “read”? What do fabrics convey about their origins, meanings and social roles? Which traditional textile techniques do artists appropriate, single out, relocate and bring back to life? Textiles represent a locus in which art comes into contact with handcrafts, tradition meets the present, and local knowledge intertwines with global relations.

The exhibition highlights the many complex ways in which the participating artists work with textiles. Personal and aesthetic narratives are linked to social and economic configurations in a global world. In 1965, Bauhaus artist Anni Albers described the “event of a thread” as multi-linear, without beginning or end: in essence, its meaning is a constant space for rethinking relationships and restructuring connections and contexts. 

Artist Judith Raum has created "The Bauhaus Space," an installation dedicated to the Bauhaus weaving workshop. We encounter woven materials and historical canvases in a specially designed display, through which the extraordinary success story is told in six chapters. 

Testimonies to the complex records of textiles etched into cultural and industrial history are found in every corner of the world. In a political climate marked by coldness and cruelty, fabrics have the power to evoke memories of warmer, more humane times, to remind us of the value of handwork, to call for empathy and solidarity. Hence, in collaboration with contemporary domestic artists, the main exhibition setting is complemented by artworks that create new narratives significant for textiles in the local context and their engaged response to various states of oppression, both systemic and interpersonal.

The works from the collection of the MSU Skopje, in this context, are exhibited not only as testimonies to the lived experiences and memories resulting from the earthquake, but also as a strong reminder today of the need for the broken threads of global networks of support and empathy that transform the tragic event of personal and collective loss into a model of transnational solidarity.

Artists: Ulla von Brandeburg, Kristina Bozhurska, Jane Chalovski and Hristina Ivanoska, Noah Eshkol, Andreas Eckner, Uli Fischer, Sile Homa Hamid, Heide Hinrichs, Olaf Holzafel, Christa Jettner, Eliza van Joolen and Vincent Wulzma, Jovan Josifovski, Eva Mayr and Eran Schaerf, Karen Michelsen Castanon, Judith Raum, Franz Erhard Walter, Zorica Zafirovska and Klelija Zivkovic;

Together with the installation "Bauhaus Space", a visual archive of the history of the weaving workshop in the Bauhaus Dessau and Weimar complex (artistic research: Judith Raum; design: Jakob Kirsch; architecture: S.T.I.F.F.) and artworks by artists represented in the MSU-Skopje Collection: Sonja Dimitrova, Dimche Koco, Jolanta Ovidska, Ismet Ramičević, Lisa Rechsteiner, Mira Spirovska, Duško Stojanovski, Patricia Velasco Ualin.

The exhibition is supported by the German Embassy - North Macedonia and the Goethe Institute - North Macedonia and Tikvesh.