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).

Tapestry

The arts and crafts shop that arranged the event in yesterday's post also has a small gallery for exhibitions. What is on display there varies from time to time. Earlier in September I popped in one day to have a look at some tapestries - woven wall hangings. The artist's name is Birgitta Jönsson and her theme for the exhibition was "summer".

I especially liked the big one of a small tortoiseshell butterfly.

These were made with bicycle tubes!

Editing my photos now, Carole King's song Tapestry came to mind for me.
(The album is an old favourite of mine , I have it on CD.)

My life has been a tapestry of rich and royal hue
An everlasting vision of the ever-changing view
A wondrous, woven magic in bits of blue and gold
A tapestry to feel and see, impossible to hold

https://youtu.be/JM07lUytXA0

Weekend Reflections: "We Knit For Peace"

The weather has turned a little more spring-like again, and today I found myself itching to "do something", as in finding some sort of goal for my daily walk besides just walking... I still don't want to take any unnecessary risks, though, as I'm still waiting for vaccine, and the virus is still in a "third wave" around here...

From the back of my mind, something popped up that I had read about earlier in the winter. When not able to welcome visitors as usual, our Textile Museum decided to put one of its exhibitions on display in the windows of some abandoned shops downtown. I never happened to pass by any of those during my sparse winter walks into town, though - usually just focused on a few necessary errands. But today I did not have any errands, I just wanted to be out for a while... So I made note of the addresses from the museum's website, and went in search of them. (I only found three out of five, but never mind.)

The exhibition is entitled "We knit for peace" and I think it was the result of a project where they asked people to contribute works on this theme. There is also a circus theme involved.

While today was a good day for a walk, it probably wasn't really the best day for taking photos of things in display windows. On the other hand - you know I'm fascinated by reflections as well... So never mind...

 

Not easy to keep myself out of the picture, either... ;)

Do you knit? I used to do it back in the mid 1970s into the early 1980s - it was really popular back then. I even had some male friends who used to knit back then. Whether they still do, I don't know! Myself, I have not kept it up. When I started getting problems with neck/shoulder/arm pain, it no longer felt like a "peaceful" hobby...

 

Linking to Weekend/Street Reflections #12

Gianni Versace Exhibition

Giovanni Versace, 1946-1997, was an Italian fashion designer and founder of Versace, an international fashion house. Last weekend I went to see an exhibition of clothes and textiles he designed, at the Textile Museum here (Borås, Sweden).

 

Of all the items displayed in the exhibition, I think this suit was my favourite - as in something I might actually have been tempted to try on (i.e. if it had been my size, for sale and affordable...)

There happened to be a guided tour starting 15 minutes after I arrived, so I joined that. One of the things I learned from that was the fact that they had had a lot of trouble dressing the mannequins for this exhibition (even though they had got the smallest ones available). Evidently, Versace preferred his models small and thin, and most of the materials used back then weren't elastic - and unlike real humans, display dummies are not very flexible!

Do you like wearing colour, and clothes that stick out a bit?
I like colour, but not really so much that it automatically makes me the centre of attention... ;)

More from The House of Glass (III)

From the contemporary art exhibition:

Kjell Engman:
”This is the Borderland
the Blue Lagoon, the liquid
and the solid.
There a bird hangs,
the bird symbolizes freedom.
The flow of water is constant,
the water has frozen into glitter.

[translation by me]

 

Heli Heino:

Hand-blown glasses displayed in a window

 

The chairs are antique furniture upholstered with new fabrics in patterns designed by the artist.

X for eXcursion (ABC Wednesday)

‘Xcuse me please, but there are no places in Sweden beginning with the letter X. But the town where I live is part of a historically interesting teXtile industry district – and does it really matter where in the word the X appears?

Yesterday my aunt and uncle were visiting, and they wanted to take me and a friend of my aunt’s out to lunch. They had a place just outside town in mind. But as it happened, we missed an eXit or two, found no place to turn the car around, and ended up on an eXcursion further on into the teXtile district instead.

At Rydal there is an old cotton spinning mill that has been turned into a museum:

The mill was built in 1853. Rydal is also where the first hydro-electric power station in the country was built, and this mill was the first building in Sweden to have indoor electric lighting.

Just now there is an eXhibition of Swedish Design from the 1960s and 70s going on. This is an eXhibition I also saw last year at the Textile Museum in Borås. So I recognized a lot of the objects, but since they were hung and eXposed quite differently here, it still did not feel quite like a repetition.

That’s my refleXion in the mirror to the right!

As eXtraordinary as some of the eXhibited objects were, we did not linger too long, because by now we were getting eXcruciatingly hungry!

As the inn across the road from the museum did not serve lunch eXcept if one had made reservations in advance, we had to go on to the neXt small town to find a place to eat. But when we finally found a café named Tailor’s Shop (Skrädderiet) in Kinna, it proved worth the wait.

The eXterior of the place looked very inviting too:

ABC Wednesday – X

(I know, I know. There should have been Xs instead of pushpins on the map. I just didn’t know how…)