CraftVoice

As part of the Crossways of Knowledge conference-festival in Surabaya, in August 2024, hosted by the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS), I curated and organised the group exhibition CraftVoice. The exhibition occurred on July 28 - August 2, 2024, at Balai Pemuda, Surabaya.

CraftVoice is a trans-local assemblage of stories of making, learning, and using. Drawing together craft practices that are otherwise divided by national borders, standards of taste, and classificatory systems, we aim to present a humanistic perspective of craft centered around the voices of makers and their connections with people, materials, places, environments and technologies.

Featured across 7 sites are craft stories of making and being in the world where the maker and the thing being made are in a dynamic relationship, in continual flux, in both space and time, within a wider ecology of cultural practice,  interpretation, and exchange. We journey from pastoral groups in the Indian Himalayas and the Arab World, to women in conflict zones across South Asia, then track the impact of migrant Japanese craftswomen in Brazil, the Moana Oceania diaspora communities in Aotearoa New Zealand, and end with the question of how AI may take part in the transmission of lace-making knowledge. By highlighting the multifaceted relationships embodied in the stories of making and being with objects, which inevitably involve change and adaptation, we become witnesses to the transformative power of human creativity and resilience.

CraftVoice is the result of a collaboration between members of two networks: 

the Knowledge House for Craft (KHC), an association of craft scholars, practitioners, and designers with a shared interest in re-centring the role of craft in the contemporary world of techno-economic intensification, and alienation, through the building of a dynamic repository of geographically and culturally diverse understandings of human making.

and 

the Humanities Across Borders (HAB) program of the International Institute for Asian Studies, The Netherlands, which supports trans-local and trans-regional collaborations to bridge the distance between knowledge from within the walls of academe, and knowledge that comes from being-in-the-world.

Participated exhibitors: 

Laila Al-Hamad, Independent researcher (Kuwait City)

Patricia Flanagan, Co-director Interactive Media Lab, Lecturer in Textiles, School of Art and Design, University of New South Wales (Sydney), Board Member of the Knowledge House of Craft

LOkesh Ghai, Independent researcher & artist working with craft communities; (Dehradun & Ahmedabad)  

Toluma‘anave Barbara Makuati-Afitu & Kolokesa Uafā Māhina-Tuai, Co-directors of Lagi-Maama Academy and Consultancy, an educational and cultural organisation based in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand. (Auckland)

Liliana Morais, Specially Appointed Associate Professor, Department of Contemporary Culture, College of Sociology, Rikkyo University (Tokyo)

Neelam Raina, Associate Professor in Design and Development, Middlesex University (London)

Sharon Tsang-de Lyster, Independent researcher and Founder of Narrative Made, The Textile Atlas and Craft Frontiers Foundation (Hong Kong)