Raisa Kabir

Opening 20 November

Raisa Kabir is an interdisciplinary artist and weaver whose work utilises textiles, sculpture, video and performance to materialise and explore concepts relating to the cultural politics of cloth, textile archives, and colonial geographies. 

In this newly commissioned solo exhibition at Tramway, Kabir explores the intertwined textile legacies of Scotland and South Asia, responding to the cavernous scale of the venue with an ambitious, theatrical installation comprising multiple textile and sculptural works.

For Kabir, textile archives act as both the physical raw material and the conceptual foundation of her work, which approaches archives as repositories of global politics, migration, and colonial memory.  Through her weaving and research, Kabir explores how Eastern, Central, and South Asian textile technologies directly shaped Western weaving knowledge and industrial production. By unpicking these material links, she exposes the migration, displacement, and industrial appropriation of ancient South Asian craft traditions, and how patterns and designs have been claimed by nations.

Reflecting on Glasgow’s legacy as a colonial merchant city and trading port, the immersive, site-specific installation House of The Stolen Weavers features a series of new sculptures that simultaneously evoke loom architectures, maritime boats, ships and sails. These works are suspended, balanced, weighted or anchored across the space, evoking feelings of tension, weight, precarity, balance and release.

Kabir’s new large scale ‘loom-house-boat’ sculptures evoke hybridised forms that move between shelter, vessel and weaving apparatus. Two large central sculptures combine the anatomy of a traditional hand loom with the silhouettes of colonial sugar ships that once sailed the River Clyde, as well as traditional Bangladeshi boats. Multiple large-scale hand-woven and digitally woven tapestries are suspended throughout the gallery, incorporating motifs and references to South Asian delta and flood maps. 

Elsewhere, Kabir works with found objects, including coracles—woven circular boats which she has  filled with cotton, silk, indigo, cochineal, jute and flax—bringing the materials and vessels of global textile histories into the installation. The coracles also feature in a new film featuring a performance by Kabir projected  in the space, extending the themes and material language of the installation.

In this exhibition, Kabir continues their research into the textile geographies of labour connecting Kashmiri woven shawls with the silk-weaving industry in Paisley, Scotland. The Buta, Boteh or Ambi design, later known as Paisley originated in the Kashmir region of India, and gained prominence during the 18th and 19th centuries through the British East India Company’s trade. As demand for Kashmir shawls increased, European manufacturers imitated and mass-produced the design using new technologies such as the Jacquard loom. This appropriation, together with colonial policies, led to declining sales for Indian craftspeople and negatively affected the Indian textile industry. 

Kabir’s work also explores the history of partition in South Asia and the intertwined textile heritages of centuries-old patterns that moved across geographies before present-day borders existed. These histories are further complicated by post-war migration from South Asia, which supplied labour to British textile factories in Scotland and Northern England.

Across the exhibition, Kabir draws on these colonial histories to uncover the global mobility of textile production and technology, whilst also celebrating the rich craft practices and traditions of the Bengal delta, including those of Kabir’s ancestral land in Barisal. 

Image: Raisa Kabir, Tiger, Tiger. Silk Throat…, 2023.