Output details

Staging Material, Performing Culture

Building on a body of writing, reviews and lectures addressing critical issues in the contexts of textile art and textile culture, Mitchell’s article supports and frames a relationship between exchange, conversation and enactment as manifested through textile practice in the context of a textile biennial, with 'Textile 07: Kaunas Textile Art Biennial' as the focus in this instance.

The article developed from a review of the Kaunas Biennial (also with Katherine Nolan for 'Textile: the Journal of Cloth and Culture', Vol. 7, No. 1., pp. 114-119, 2009) which addressed the general remit of the Biennial and a limited number of works, alongside wider critical issues arising from the Lithuanian context in relation to the agency of textiles in effecting and facilitating global exchange.

The article provoked and sustained research exchanges between local organisers Virginija Vitkienė and Ed Carroll, international curators Janis Jefferies (UK), Fernando Marques Penteado (Brazil) and Fiona Kirkwood (South Africa), and Mitchell (UK), as evident in online debates focusing on contemporary textile culture (the article has been republished online to facilitate further dialogues and stimulate new audiences). As well as initiating the collaboration with Nolan and contributing substantially to the final editing, Mitchell’s contribution to the project focused on notions of textile and pattern as a significant and typically overlooked medium of international exchange, effecting contemporary dialogue through the biennial format.