Every year “White Armband Day” takes place on 31 May, the anniversary of the start of the campaign of ethnic cleansing which took place in the town of Prijedor, northern Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Bosnian Serb authorities issued a decree on local radio ordering all non-Serb citizens to mark their houses with white flags or bedsheets and to wear white armbands when leaving the house. This began campaign of extermination.
To mark this anniversary I have been given the opportunity to exhibit ‘Lie Down’ within the entrance to the art department at City of Oxford College for 4 weeks during their end of year shows and the run up to the end of the summer term.
This is a fantastic opportunity to reach a new audience some of whom may have been around in 1995 but would have been too young to know anything about the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Last month I was selected as the Remembering Srebrenica Community Champion of the month for February. I am really excited and extremely proud of this recognition.
“Each month the team at Remembering Srebrenica selects a ‘Community Champion of the Month’ to celebrate the inspiring work of our fantastic supporters across the UK. Community Champions for the 11 months preceding July will be invited to light a candle of remembrance at the UK Srebrenica Memorial Service in July.
We are delighted to announce that February’s Community Champion of the Month is Katie Taylor!
Katie is a contemporary textiles artist from Oxford who attended a ‘Lessons from Srebrenica’ delegation to Bosnia last year. Her work was shown in a recent exhibition, disPLACED, which took place at the P21 Gallery in London, and showcased her powerful and thought-provoking new piece, ‘Lie Down’. Over the course of three weeks, hundreds of people had the opportunity to engage with Srebrenica thanks to her work.
‘Lie Down’ was a thoroughly creative and original way to get people to think about the horror of genocide. The piece, made by rags soaked in coffee, represented the countless ligatures used to detain prisoners and echoed the white armbands that Bosnian Muslims were forced to wear, while its height of 150cm references the height at which boys were sent away with their fathers. Katie said that the act of ripping up material made her ask herself, “Whose job had it been to create the blindfolds and fabric ligatures? Had they considered and known of their intended use?” By examining the genocide in this way, the audience were invited to think about those who are complicit in genocide. Images of ‘Lie Down’ can be viewed here and Katie also plans to mark Srebrenica Memorial Week with a new exhibition.
Everyone at Remembering Srebrenica would like to thank Katie for her hard work in using her talent to bring the lessons from Srebrenica to a whole new audience.”
Exhibition Dates: 20th January – 10th February 2018
Curators: CARU | Contemporary Arts ReSearch Unit
Artists: Alissar McCreary, Janice Howard, Robin James, Ray Hedger, Katie Taylor, Alex Newton, Fiona Harvey, Anna Yearwood, Aldobranti andBlanca Rodriguez Beltran …as well as those who participated in the disPLACED workshops.
Contemporary Arts ReSearch Unit presents a group exhibition in the beautiful P21 gallery. The show includes a solo exhibition by Lebanese artist Alissar McCreary, which showcases her practice-based PhD research.
Upstairs on the ground floor, the exhibition brings together artists whose work evokes a wide range of responses to the title theme ‘disPLACED’. The works include photography, video, painting, prints, sculpture, as well as an accumulative installation of small figurines made by the public. Visitors are invited to create and add their own little person to the installation.
Downstairs, Alissar McCreary presents the culmination of her seven-year research into her experience of displacement as a Lebanese refugee. Her PhD, titled “Hybrid Residues/Memories: Utilising active participation within sculptural art practice as a direct form of communication to implicate experiences of war and displacement.”, explores the reciprocity between art, active participation, and traced memories of displacement. ‘The aim of my research is to examine what American philosopher and artist David Abram calls ‘sensorial empathy’. In my thesis I have appropriated the term and redefined it as the ‘silent sense’. I interpret this ‘silent sense’ as a kind of connection or ‘knowing’ that we intuitively recognise but cannot always articulate or express with language. I am interested in how and when sensorial empathy takes place, and how it might affect the viewer’s perception of the displacement which is happening every day to millions of people in the world.’
I will be showing the following three pieces of work:
I currently have two pieces of work in the 19th Mini Textiles Exhibition at Umelka in Bratislava, Slovakia. I was excited to be able to make the Private view on Wednesday 31st May.
The exhibition includes the work of 56 international textile artists and 22 students selected from 135 applicants. It is an exciting opportunity to be included.
Visitors to the Mini Textiles Exhibition
Sum
One of the two pieces of min exhibited within the exhibition.
Sum and Lay Waste
A lovely after show meet up, was arranged for all the exhibiting artists. This was a wonderful opportunity to make contacts and connections and I was invited to a graduate fashion show the following evening.
Entangled at Turner Contemporary is one of those must see exhibitions. Full of so many inspiring and important textile artists. Too many to list but I have highlighted my favorites in the images below.
It is exciting that textile art is becoming more of a recognized medium and that exhibitions such as this one are being given prominence in major art galleries like the previous exhibition ‘Art Textiles’ at The Whitworth
This is an exhibition of purely female artists which is fantastic, but I wish this information could be left to the viewer. I felt that the emphasis on women was repeated far too often.
