Hana Miletić:
Dependencies – at Wiels, Brussel
Dependencies, the first major exhibition to date of Belgian artist Hana Miletić, is centred around the textile works that she made over the last three years. Reconnecting with a craft from her childhood in former Yugoslavia, she recently became active in communal textile workshops in Brussels, where she works together with women from different backgrounds.
The exhibition includes these collaborative works as well as a new series of large textiles, which Miletić wove on a handloom over the course of ten months. The artist modelled these after the photographs she took in the streets of Brussels and Zagreb, documenting makeshift solutions for fixing broken car parts or protecting buildings under construction.
The artist sees weaving—which requires considerable time and dedication—as a metaphorical process that allows her to reflect on certain social and cultural conditions. She calls this a practice of “care and repair,” through which she aims to re-evaluate the relationships between working, thinking and feeling.
Miletić goes beyond the reproductive labour of weaving to intervene sculpturally, undoing parts of the close-knit fabric to expose the intricate bonds between the yarns. Proposing a soft activism, she uses these material gestures to explore the values that bind (or separate) people.
Hana Miletić
Dependencies
10 May – 12 August 2018
WIELS
Avenue Van Volxemlaan 354
Brussels (BE)
Courtesy of the artist and Wiels
Photography: Kristien Daem