Hidden stories #6

It's Pride month: in June we celebrate the LGBTQIA+ community, but also draw attention to the emancipation and acceptance of the queer community. (1) As a museum, we have the opportunity to reinforce our values through our collection. Acquiring works allows us to support the LGBTQIA+ rights movement. In addition, next autumn the exhibition 'Haus of fibre' will be on show at the TextielMuseum. This exhibition explores the relationship between queer art and textiles. The exhibition was created through co-creation. After an open-call we selected four queer artists to make 'Haus of fibre' with us. Of these four artists: Nixie van Laere, Célio Braga, Chathuri Nissansala and Yamuna Forzani, several works have been acquired for our collection and will be on display in the exhibition. 

Ever since the 1980s, the museum has collected artworks that reflect on gender and sexuality: textiles are, in fact, an ideal material for soft resistance to the patriarchy, something several generations of queer artists have done. In honour of Pride Month, we highlight these recently acquired works:

Chathuri Nissansala (she, they) is a multidisciplinary artist from Sri Lanka. Their work focuses on matters like queerness, gender, class, colonialism and nationalism. The TextielMuseum acquired, among others, her video work Nachchi Samayama. The Nachchi is a unique indigenous community in Sri Lanka of people who identify outside cisgender identity. (2) This community is often seen as a testament to the resilience and diversity of gender expression in Sri Lankan society, stemming from pre-colonial times. (3) 

Chathuri uses traditional beading techniques of the Navandanna caste, a caste that has traditionally played an important role in crafts and the making of religious figures and altars in Sri Lanka. She combines these techniques with objects she found in places of violence during the Sri Lankan civil war. These abandoned spaces are now used as meeting and cruising places for the queer community, that is still persecuted since the colonial rule of various European powers. For instance, the work Calling to Coax Beings IV includes a Buddha statue, for which she made beaded ornaments with symbolic patterns from exorcist rituals. In this way, she reclaims and heals stories from her history and redefines tradition.

Yamuna Forzani's (she/her) work centres on creating a queer utopia, a future world where everyone is free to be themselves. Yamuna is a multidisciplinary artist and queer activist; her work is a celebration of her community. The TextielMuseum has acquired her work It Takes A Village. This colourful tapestry, knitted in the TextielLab, shows a group of queer people in a renaissance composition: powerful and divine, but also vulnerable and interdependent. 

The phrase "It takes a village" refers to the large number of people it takes to raise a child. It is a statement that emphasises the importance of community. Mutual solidarity is therefore important in Yamuna's work. LGBTQIA+ people often live outside societal norms and in doing so, find their freedom and connection with each other. Yamuna herself is active within the ballroom community: an LGBTQIA+ subculture that combines drag (4), dance, fashion and performance. Within ballroom culture, participants belong to a so-called “house” or “haus”(5) that acts as a chosen family. It Takes A Village is an hommage to this family and to a future in which queer people can flourish. The acquisition of this work is the next piece of the puzzle to integrate Yamuna's world in our collection. Earlier, we also purchased several of her outfits, in which members of her own haus regularly present themselves at ballroom nights. You can read more about one of these outfits in another blog post.

Nixie van Laere (she, they) is an artist, writer and parent. Her work reflects on her life as a trans woman within a queer family, using textiles, video, text and performance. Her work is intimate and personal, but also relates the personal to a broader historical perspective and to questions about creating new life as an HIV+ person(6).  

The TextielMuseum has acquired It's Giving: a video work that combines home videos with archival material from trans activist Chloe Dzubilo and others. Nixie connects her own family to the queer history that preceded it. This intimacy is interspersed with footage of a pro-Palestine protest, referring to current conflicts that have sparked demonstrations and activist movements, in which many LGBTQIA+ers play a key role. We also see footage of Nixie showing a strip of hormone medication, overlaid with archival footage from a trans support group. The interweaving of Nixie's images with historic images highlights the connection between past and present. The video work is an ode to queer families and to how love has always coexisted next to struggle. This is also reflected in the other work the museum acquired: a felted portrait of her family, made when her partner was pregnant with their second child.