Exhibition — Sep 14, 2024 until Jan 5, 2025

Contemporary artists explore the transformative and subversive potential of textiles through stitching, weaving, braiding, and knotting. They communicate multi-layered stories about lived experience, addressing gender, colonialism, the movement and displacement of people, ancient forms of knowledge, and more.

From intimate hand-crafted works to large-scale sculptural installations: all works are radical in their form and politics, revealing how textiles have been forces of resistance and repair. Unravel brings together over 100 artworks of international practitioners, including Magdalena Abakanowicz, Mounira Al Sohl, Mercedes Azpilicueta, Louise Bourgeois, Feliciano Centurión, Cian Dayrit, Tracey Emin, Quiltmakers of the Gee's Bend (Loretta Pettway), Jeffrey Gibson, Antonio Jose Guzman and Iva Jankovic, Sheila Hicks, Teresa Margolles, Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, Faith Ringgold, Lenore Tawney, and Billie Zangewa.

Tapestry by Teresa Margolles
Teresa Margolles, 'american Juju for the Tapestry of Truth', 2015. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Peter Kilchmann Zurich/Paris.

The exhibition Unravel is organized by the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and the Barbican, London. Curated by Amanda Pinatih (Stedelijk) and Lotte Johnson and Well Fray-Smith (Barbican).

The exhibition in Amsterdam is generously supported by the Cultuurfonds.