The exhibition brings together works by twelve contemporary artists who use textile materials to develop new visual languages and negotiate current issues - drawing on traditional techniques as well as developing experimental forms.
develop experimental forms.

Artists such as Sheila Hicks and Annegret Soltau are still pioneers, using textile techniques that women have traditionally often practiced in the home to question the boundaries of art, to address physicality and vulnerability as well as identity and collective memory.

However, the spectrum of meaning of textiles in this exhibition also addresses political themes that utilize the subversive potential of sensual-tactile works, because with their unique ability to constantly interweave different threads, textile techniques were and are often carriers of revolutionary content, media of political protest and expressions of artistic and social self-empowerment. The artists combine textiles with high-tech, create hybrid objects with bobbin-lace cables, sew or process non-textile materials or create pictogram-like designs in both the material and digital space. Who still thinks of a net structure made of thread when they think of the Internet today?

Nevertheless, textile art often remains a border crosser between art and craft, between intimacy and publicity, between functional object and symbolic carrier, between tradition and innovation. It is precisely this supposed ambivalence that has made it a powerful means of expression for female artists. A means of expression that negotiates current political and social discourses and makes (collective) identity(ies) visible. The materiality of textile artworks makes the fabric - whereby "fabric" refers to both the content and the material - almost physically tangible.

The exhibition "Threads create worlds" brings together a wide variety of works that show that textiles are not a passive carrier material, but an active site of artistic and political debate. They tell stories, interweave cultures and touch on themes that shape societies.

With works by: Ngozi Ajah Schommers, Rufina Bazlova, Denise Bettelyoun, Patricia Dreyfus, Sheila Hicks, Constanza Camila Kramer Garfias, Gulnur Mukazhanova, Daniela Polz, Gertrud Riethmüller, Annegret Soltau, Hoda Tawakol and Carola Willbrand.

Supported by the Kulturfonds Frankfurt RheinMain and the Cultural Office of the City of Wiesbaden.