More from the Textile Museum

At the Textile Museum (link to a previous post) there is also a permanent exhibition of old machinery used in production of textiles. Borås is an old textile industry town, and there used to be lots of textile factories here. Nowadays much of the production takes place abroad even if we still have a lot of focus on both fashion design and mailorder here. 

I snapped some random photos of various machines on my recent visit, but I don't have any details about them, so just enjoy the photos (if you like).

 

 

This display I think is to remind us of the fact that nowadays most the production takes place in poorer countries - just so that we here in the "western world" shall be able to buy too much, too cheap...

And this is to illustrate what one might have expected to find in a teenager's wardrobe in 1950 vs 1980 and 2010. Personally I suspect that this development has continued, and that teenagers 2024 must be having difficulties fitting all their clothes and footwear into just one wardrobe... What do you think?!

For my own part, I have to confess that I fill all of the wardrobe space I have in my flat all by myself (plus some extra storage down in the basement)  - which makes me wonder sometimes how families living in similar size flats (or smaller) manage their situation...

Visiting the Textile Museum

On Tuesday the weather here turned out better than expected, and after lunch at home I decided to venture out on a walk stretching a bit further than my immediate neighbourhood. I was not quite sure of my goal until I was half way there... But I ended up visiting the Textile Museum to have a look at their current exhibitions. 

This installation meets you at the entance just now and I think it is part of a new permanent exhibition called Reboot Fashion, which "explores the path towards a circular textile future through innovative production methods, while also inviting individuals to engage and influence change". The sign below was on display nearby:

This huge textile sculpture by artist Diana Orving, which stretches over two floors in the museum, is entitled What could be touched and that beyond (2023). It fits in with the theme above but is also part of this summers Art Biennial.

"In this particular case, her choice of textile is one that hardly ever is associated with the glamour of the fashion world: jute. The material is brown and has coarse structure; it is cheap and durable and has been used for centuries to package all kinds of things that are necessary to life, such as grain, turnips and beans. The woven, thich fabric is used and reused and might travel around the world several times. [---] Orving reminds us of the global nature of the textile industry..."

A temporary exhibition upstairs is entitled Printed Positions.  

"Since the turn of the millennium, pattern design has undergone a technical and aesthetic revolution, to a great extent spurred on by the development of digital technology. In Printed Positions, contemporary textile-pattern design is explored through works by 14 Nordic designers and artists."

This installation in the middle of the huge exhibition hall gives the impression of a ship, and there were also other textiles in the background to underline the marine theme.

As for the rest, I soon gave up on trying to "interpret"...!

In the smaller room on the same floor was an exhibition showing works by this year's graduates from the Swedish School of Textiles at the local University.

This is the building from outside.

I bought an ice cream at the café before I started on my walk back. (This is their outdoors terrace by the main entrance, but I ate my ice cream sitting in a comfortable high back armchair indoors...) 
 

Jaume Plensa's sculpture House of Knowledge has been sitting outside our Textile Fashion Center for 10 years now. I blogged about the installation of it back in May 2014. And there have been more photos of it now and then over the years since then as well... I can hardly ever resist snapping one whenever I pass it, even though I know I have plenty before! (In this one, you can see a couple of people sitting inside it, there is a bench there.)

On the other side of the road, there is this mural on the wall of the University to look at.

 

I also have some photos from an older permanent exhibition of machinery etc + some more photos from my walk there and back, but will save those for other posts.

TUBE

The current major exhibition at our Textile Museum is entitled "Tube", and has only one single object on display. It's an absolutely gigantic installation, though - filling the whole largest exhibition hall.

TUBE
A vertiginous
social sculpture
by Numen / For Use

Welcome to enter into TUBE!
Climbers, put your shoes here.

Visitors are invited to climb into the Tube and crawl around in it. Not something that would really have appealed to me personally at any age - and certainly not now... So I just went for a slow walk around it with my camera.. Alas, I was also the only visitor at the time, so also did not get to see anyone else moving around in there. It was still a rather weird experience in itself, though, just walking around it all by myself... (There was a guard sitting on a chair along the wall, keeping watch - obviously they need to make sure no one gets stuck in there! But as I had no intention of going in, I did not talk to her.) There was also some spooky music in the background as sound effect.

 
In my mind, I saw the thing as some kind of giant sea serpent. I guess all the lines and the shadows cast by the net contributed to that impression.

After a slow turn around the beast with my camera, I left it to hunger for braver visitors than myself, and walked back out into the sunshine.

 

The spring-summer exhibition at Textilmuseet invites visitors to explore the three-dimensional net installation Tube. The suspension of the net makes it swing and move as you move together through the winding formation. The transparency creates a feeling of floating freely as well as a tension between the security of being surrounded by the supporting net and the danger of the dizzying height.

The design collective Numen / For Use works across borders with design, scenography and architecture. They are particularly known for large, intricate installations that visitors can take part of physically by climbing into, crawling through, or hiding inside. In the exhibition at the Textile Museum, the interactive installation Tube will be shown for the first time in the Nordic countries. The work consists of tunnels of net which the visitors are invited to climb through and experience the room from a completely new perspective.

Tube was first shown in 2015 in Austria and has since been set up in 6 more locations around Europe. The installation is a hybrid of art and design– a kind of "social sculpture" in the shape of a giant spider's web that stretches in all directions, circles around the pillars and breaks the straight lines of the room with irregular diagonals.

Read more at the Museum's website here (in English).

An Artsy Saturday Afternoon

Besides today being Election Day in Sweden, it's also been Art Gallery Weekend in Borås. Alas all the art galleries open and buses running in a loop between them doesn't mean I've got the energy to visit them all... So I settled for a walk to the Textile Museum (and back), Saturday afternoon.

 
In the entrance hall, I noticed this new 'bench', shaped like a clothes peg. Rather clever!

One of the exhibitions upstairs, about a local wallpaper company, was the same as on my last visit back in March.

 

The new exhibition is entitled 'Pattern-Mania' (Swedish: 'Mönstermani') and is about 20th century Swedish Textile Design - especially printed patterns from the 1920s onward, through the 1990s.

 I arrived in the middle of a guided tour going on, and sort of kept on the outskirts of that - hearing some of it, but at the same time moving along at my own pace... All photos taken with my mobile, as I didn't have my other camera with me.

Many of the patterns were displayed in the home environments they were designed for - like kitchen, living room, bedroom etc.

Other displays focused on special holidays or time of the year:

 

This wall of clothes reminded me of how I loved to play with paper dolls as a child :-)

Speaking of childhood - did you wonder about those coloured balls in front of the building in the first photo? I had a closer look at that installation on my way back - and found it rather 'disturbing'...

 

They're made of castaway soft toys! A sign nearby says that the thought behind it is to make us think about what becomes of the things we throw away...

" TEDDY ORBS. - Do you know where your old teddy bear is? (Most people don't, so don't be ashamed!) This work of art consists of old teddy bears that have been deconstructed and reconstructed to a collection of colourful spheres. The purpose of this work of art is to provoke the viewer to think about where their old teddy bears are, and how they get rid of them. / Felicia Hansen, Instagram: @felicia_oh."

I'd recommend parents and grandparents with young children in tow to give this outdoors installation a wide berth if they don't want to end up in trouble, though... Back in my childhood, we were patiently persuaded to let worn-out cuddly toys be respectfully sent to retirement up in the attic, with lots of assurances that they'd be much happier there!

Across the road from the Textile Fashion Center is the University. They've recently had a new mural painted to replace an old one that had to be removed in connection with necessary repairs of the wall. The old mural (also an eagle) was so popular that they hired the same artist to do the new one, though. He made the new one similar but still a bit different. For comparison, if you like, have a look at the old mural here. (Post from 2015.)