Preview, Plural Kinships

Enjoy a first look at our winter exhibition, Plural Kinships, bringing together artists Rasia Kabir and Fadhel Mourali, two practitioners connected through craft, material storytelling and interwoven histories.

Tickets are pay what you can. All donations are warmly appreciated and directly support our work as a registered charity, creating inclusive, accessible art experiences and helping artists to thrive.

Artists, art workers, and practitioners are invited from 5.30pm for an extra half hour of networking and conversation before the preview.

About the exhibition

Plural Kinships explores the intergenerational and geographical interconnectedness of heritage, identity, and place. The exhibition uses traditional craft as a methodology to trace how knowledge, both embodied and inherited, is preserved, transformed, and passed on through materials, rituals, and oral histories across diasporas. Fed by research, both artists unpick how communities creatively adapt, creating from their locality as a means to sustain meaning, belonging, and open kinships; shaping a tapestry of connected histories that extend beyond perceived notions of History.

About the artists

Raisa Kabir utilises woven text/textiles, sound, video, and performance to materialise concepts concerning the cultural politics of cloth, gendered archives, and colonial geographies. Kabir’s (un)weaving performances and tapestries comment on histories of trans-national power, global production, and matrixes of labour. Her textile works use a queer theory of entanglement to weave discourse around disability, resisting function and the queer racialised body as a living archive of collective trauma.

She has participated in residencies and exhibited work internationally at, among others: The Whitworth, The Tetley, Glasgow International, Craft Council London, Ford Foundation gallery NYC; and has lectured on her research at Tate Modern, Institute of Contemporary Art London, The Courtauld, and the V&A.

Textile designer Fadhel Mourali built a mode of practice out of the legacy of his great-grandfather, a Swedish artisan known as ‘the last basket maker from Risa’. A handweaver himself, Mourali spun the wood fibres of these baskets into yarn through his own hands whilst processing these fibres as pieces of storytelling.

He explores weaving as a method to connect past and present, in the hope to reach the core of a subject, to fully understand a medium or narrative. By applying his own lived experience as a queer Swede with a North African background, he diversifies the possibilities of tradition, where his craft strives to broaden perspectives on identity and expand notions of kinship.

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Host or Publisher Aspex Portsmouth