Grant Watson
In this episode of our Deep Dive series, curator Grant Watson takes us through his research project, Folded Life: Talking Textile Politics, developed in collaboration with editor Jill Winder and commissioned by the Johann Jacobs Museum, Zürich.
The project uses interviews as a way to tell stories about textile politics and the inter-scaler nature of cloth. Through personal use and subjective attachment, textiles connect us to a field of social meaning linked to labour, trade, cultural appropriation and exchange, histories of colonial violence, and to questions of ecology and social justice. This talk will explore how, as cultural artefacts, textiles also have the potential to express values, and to disrupt and dissent through meaning making and style, as has been the case with feminist, gay liberation, and queer sensibilities.
Bookings are closed for this event.
Curator
Grant Watson’s curatorial work involves both long-term interview projects and exhibition strands. Interviews including How We Behave (2012 – ) and Folded Life: Talking Textiles Politics (2021 -) explore radical life practice within the framework of a collective politics. Exhibitions have reflected on left histories, the politics of textiles, modern and contemporary Indian art and the transcultural, through collaborations with artists and critical readings of archives. Notable amongst the latter are Santhal Family: positions around an Indian sculpture (2008) Nasreen Mohamed: Notes (2010) Textiles Art and the Social Fabric (2010) Tagore’s Universal Allegories (2013) Keywords (2014) and the international research project bauhaus imaginista (2016 – 2019). Watson is a Tutor in Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art in London and Theory Tutor at the Dutch Art Institute. He has a PhD in Visual Cultures from Goldsmiths College, London and was recipient of the 2019/20 BAK Fellowship.
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