The Sharjah Biennial 16 title, to carry, is a multivocal and open-ended proposition as well as an invitation to encounter the different formations and positions of the five curators—Alia Swastika, Amal Khalaf, Megan Tamati-Quennell, Natasha Ginwala and Zeynep Öz—as well as the constellation of resonances they have gathered.
 

As part of her curatorial concept, titled Rosestrata: Trajectory/Translations, Swastika was interested in exploring how artists collaborate as individuals to forge new connections. For The Weaving Project, one of her Biennial presentations, Swastika invited Salima Hakim, Yim Yen Sum and Güneş Terkol to participate in a residency. The three artists, who use textile and sewing in their practices, travelled to five villages in Indonesia’s Flores Island. There, they traced the footprints of ancient humans and the tradition of weaving, which has been passed down through generations as a marker of collective identity and women’s autonomy.
 

The Flores Island, part of Indonesia’s Nusa Tenggara, is well known for its weaving culture. In each of the cities, the women have their own motifs, their own techniques and different historical contexts of their weaving culture.

At Sharjah Biennial 16 (SB16), Terkol presented a textile banner, Women’s Hopes (2023), developed together with the members of Desa Prima (Indonesian Women Progressing Independently), a small-business incubator in Panggungharjo in Bantul, Indonesia. For Gori Leso Leso [Daily Working Life] (2024), she invited mothers to reflect on how weaving culture impacts their personal identity as women.

Hakim created Her Cabinet of Curiosities (2024) with insight gleaned from field study trips to learn from the women of Flores about their deep connections to the earth and to weaving culture. The installation contains fabric replicas of fossil bones and other archaeological artefacts hand-stitched in a laboratory setting, challenging the marginalisation of Indigenous communities and so-called ‘women’s knowledge’ by relocating them into the realm of scientific research.
 

Yen Sum’s SB16 artwork From Here, to There (2024) features Manggarai weaving patterns based on the spider-web-like shape of the lodok rice fields on its two ends, while the middle is peppered with references to traditional symbols of communal prosperity. Presenting the work as an interactive site, in which visitors are invited to add their own embroideries, Yim places her hopes in the potential for achieving collective unity through a conscientious reconnection with nature.

In this wide-ranging conversation, Hakim, Yen Sum and Terkol tell Swastika how their experiences in Flores Island shaped their SB16 projects. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Alia Swastika: It is interesting to see how weaving has often symbolised and spoken to social movements associated with protecting ecological and social heritage of a community. Nowadays, we are seeing this much more in contemporary art practices and contexts. So my first question to you all is in relation to your individual practices. Why do you think textile arts and craft have become a form of storytelling and protest? Maybe we can start with Güneş. 

Güneş Terkol: I have been working with textile for about 20 years. I was at the painting and tapestry department in the Mimar Sinan university in Istanbul, [where] I learned many sewing techniques, organic dyeing and patchwork style. I learned [about] many feminist artists [who]'re using textile in different ways. 

I use [the] sewing machine like a pen, like a pencil. I'm interested in gender issues, the ways women find to resist, to defend their identity. I use tales, mythological stories, also my own past life [experiences] and dreams in my work, and I cut and create my own characters.

I think textile is very light, portable, economical. It [offers] great freedom—I can work everywhere. And weaving is an ancient language. It is a form of exploration of women feminist artists and everybody. 

Alia Swastika: Salima, what do you think?

Salima Hakim: Being born in Indonesia, I have a very strong connection with textiles in almost all aspects of our culture. Since I was a little girl, I [have been] seeing patterns, images, colours and stories through textile because my mum happens to be a seamstress and she is still, to this day, very passionate about textiles. She collects so many of them! So I think organically textile has been an integral part of my everyday life. Of course, I didn't realise this at the beginning of my art practice, [when] I used textile simply because it was accessible and, [textile art] can be practiced with basic materials that I have at home.

I think my familiarity with textiles and why I see it as a medium of storytelling is also a way of me keeping my mother close at heart perhaps, and ensuring my own maternal heritage. I like the contrast of textile—it is often seen as gentle, feminine and delicate, maybe associated with the domestic world, but it allows us to carry a certain message in a more subversive way. So the softness of the fabric has the ability, I think, to mask more messages. And there's a contrast between form and content that I think is quite interesting to explore and hopefully can create conversations. 

 

Alia Swastika: And Sum? 

Yim Yen Sum: From the very beginning, textile has had an intimate and inseparable relationship with peoplekind. The words text and textile actually come from the Latin word textilis, [which] means both woven and textile-like. Textiles need to be woven repeatedly. I think this is quite like a metaphor for human civilisation. We tell the story through our body, our hand; and by the movement of the body, we form a picture, a pattern or symbol for the story.

Textile is like a tool for me to confront different situations. [For instance], by working with our hands, we push back against mass production and fast fashion. I think textile also serves as a traditional technique to communicate and to create a link and balance between the past and the present.

Alia Swastika: It's very interesting to hear how each of you is so passionate about the idea of transforming textile into something else, like [presenting] a different narrative. 

My next question is more connected to our experience of being together to collaborate and embrace different contexts and [discover] how weaving connects with ecological issues. How do you reflect on your experience in the residency programme where we moved around the islands—meeting women from different communities to create something together?

Yim Yen Sum: Months ago, Salima and I learned how to weave from the local mother in the forest, and I truly appreciate the experience. Weaving on the portable back strap looms requires deep concentration, and the local mother told us they must be very focused during the weaving—they cannot talk or sing because even a moment of distraction can lead to a mistake. My approach was to respect and to integrate this traditional technique into my art practice.

I explored ways to merge the traditional techniques and materials with modern themes and materials, and create a dialogue between the traditional and the contemporary, the past and the present to highlight the relevance of the traditional practice in today's context. The artwork that I created for Sharjah Biennial is inspired by the growing tension in today's world where social media algorithms often drive people apart. The artwork title is ‘From Here, to There’: it highlights the importance of reaching extremes and explores the themes of unity and divisions across various culture contexts. 

One of the interesting aspects of weaving is how these intertwined threads create a cohesive whole. It's a metaphor of relationships. Through my interactions with the mothers, through our conversations, we actually kind of intertwined our lives and experiences, and this interaction formed a very strong bond between us [even though] we come from different backgrounds and religions and places. So as Sum was saying earlier, me and she, we learned how to weave traditionally. So she's my partner in pain and confusion while trying to learn the traditional weaving techniques [laughs]. But yeah, the residency trip was amazing. We had a very heart-warming, wonderful time with the mother weavers in each of the villages that we visited. 

It's a very complex procedure, to learn how to do traditional weaving. It's quite demanding physically, and it's very time intensive. It takes a lot of patience and resilience to finish one weaved textile. I think I [can] find similarities also in hand sewing because I do my artworks using hand sewing. I use a little bit of a machine, but mostly it's done by hand, which also takes a long time to finish and it represents our ability to, or maybe endure or withstand, long-term struggles, both physically and emotionally. I also found the understanding, and knowledge, of our own body and the motion and how to regulate motion, how to regulate movements also influenced the process of making the weaving and its result.

 

 

So I tried to listen to my body while making the artwork. For example, the knowledge of which plants to use for natural dyes or how to create patterns, the cultural significance of each pattern, the moral values… what tools to use, what kind of wood, is passed down verbally usually. It's from mothers to daughters, of course, because only women are allowed to do the weaving in Flores. 

With regard to the link, or how the dialogue developed between what I learned from the residency and my art practice is [that] a lot of this knowledge is commonly passed down verbally because Indonesia itself has a very strong oral storytelling tradition. So all of this knowledge is not written down. It's an unpublished archive and it becomes a part of traditional folklore stories. [Through] my artwork, I'm trying to write down, to archive and present the stories, these histories and knowledge of weaving culture by maybe using some form of formal scientific knowledge producing mediums that is also a way of producing and introducing knowledge, because that's my entry point for the artwork. 

Alia Swastika: The women weavers in Flores usually sing when they have guests or they share social times together. I really enjoyed singing with them during our workshop sessions. It really became very joyful during our residency period. 

So I would like to ask Güneş: Nowadays, there are some villages, [where] they continue the tradition of using natural dyes, but in many other villages, they have shifted to industrial needles, yarns and colour. During your workshop, the mothers were telling you these stories, about the changing landscape, the changing of the ecological context, that [is forcing] them to adapt to the new situation. How do you reflect on your workshop with the mothers in Flores, Güneş? 

 

Güneş Terkol: We had a four-day workshop in their house, where our voices, words and patchworks came together. 11 Ibu [an Indonesian honorific for women], 11 mamas, joined the workshop; they created their own woman characters. A long dress represents trees because in Flores Island, they have many plants, many different kinds of trees, colours, flowers, birds, vegetables and the rest became a field or Earth or Gaia. And then they have a speech balloons. Each speech balloon has its own story, mostly daily life, or lullabies or feelings or their dreams about futures, these kind of topics. They're all with me now and I'm adding backgrounds—landscape of the mountains, plants, roads, flowers. 

Alia Swastika: Thank you so much Güneş and Sam and Salima. I'm very happy to be able to share the experience of working with you, and at the same time reflecting on our residency experience. I think it's a very good platform to not only to bring us together, to learn together, and collaborate with mothers in different villages in Flores, but at the same time, also learn from each other as artists, curator, researchers. This is also what we learned from the mothers in the villages. How the bonding and the sisterhood… being there for each other, listening to each other, [makes one] feel like being protected.

We [would like to] invite everyone to experience our joy, our warm welcome by the mothers in the [Flores Island] community, and see how the weaving culture is not only a tradition, but is also transforming into something that is more relevant to our context today—an act of resistance to defend their land and their forest.