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Many textile styles and techniques are today still connected to specific local traditions.

On the other hand, as valuable objects of trade, textiles travelled across the old merchant’s routes and created new trans-regional connections. International experts, including former gallerist and researcher Seth Siegelaub, collector Rudolf G. Smend, curators Bryony Bond (Whitworth Art Gallery) and Christine Checinska (Iniva London), explore the role of textile crafts, collection and display, asking what do we learn from textiles?

Read more on our blog page, from textile expert Rudolf G Smend.

3-6pm: Presentations

Film Screening: Textiles and Ornamental Arts of India (Ray and Charles Eames, 1955, 11 min.)

Dr. Christine Checinska: “Social Fabrics/Narrative Textiles” – Cancelled

Rudolf Smend: “Preserving an Ancient Craft – The Art of Batik”
Rudolf Smend is the founder of a gallery for textiles and a renowned collector in Cologne. His collection includes important examples of19th and early 20th century Javanese batik and has been exhibited internationally. A focus of his work is the research and mediation of textile crafts through seminars and workshops, inspired by extensive travels to the Middle East and Asia.

Seth Siegelaub
Seth Siegelaub played a pivotal role as an organizer of art exhibitions in New York 1964-1971. Since then he has been involved with research on popular culture, especially concerning the social history of hand-woven textiles throughout the world. In 1986 he founded the Center for Social Research on Old Textiles (CSROT), and began to actively build an historic textile collection. In 1997 he edited and published a first general bibliography on the history of textiles, which has been enlarged and is now available online as a free open-access database containing more than 25,000 entries. In 2000 he founded the Stichting Egress Foundation in Amsterdam to manage these diverse projects. A part of the CSROT Historic Textile Collection was recently shown in 2012 at Raven Row in London.

Bryony Bond: “We Face Forward”
Perhaps unsurprisingly for galleries based in Manchester, the Whitworth and Manchester City Galleries hold nationally significant collections of textiles and costume. These collections, and the routes by which they came to be in Manchester, were the starting point for the exhibition “We Face Forward” to look to contemporary connections between textiles and the work of contemporary artists. Bryony Bond is Exhibitions Curator (Temporary) at the Whitworth Art Gallery and the Editor of Corridor8 magazine, a journal of contemporary visual art and new writing.

6-6.30pm: Break

6.30 Panel Discussion

Bryony Bond (Whitworth Art Gallery), Dr. Christine Checinska, Seth Siegelaub (Stichting Egress Foundation), Rudolf Smend, Moderator: Axel Wieder

Matti Braun exhibition events
A programme of talks, tours, events and screenings to accompany Matti Braun’s exhibition in the galleries.