Artist: Hana Miletić
Exhibition title: Materiale
Venue: LambdaLambdaLambda, Prishtina, Kosovo
Date: March 1 – May 4, 2019
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and LambdaLambdaLambda, Prishtina
Hana Miletić’s exhibition “Materiale” features an automated work, automated works manipulated by hand, a hand-woven work using the experience of automation for its production, hand-dyed works, both hand-woven and automated. Automated and ma-nipulated.
Miletić’s works evoke different traditions and practices of tangibility and care, span-ning from handmade production to the delegated work of automation. The works are informed by images of reparations found in public space, which are at the same time signs of scarcity and gestures of maintenance. The artist translates these signs and gestures into the medium of handmade and automated weavings. Thereby she con-structs considerate installations by interlacing seemingly unrelated threads: from urban photography to textiles, to households and to overlooked aspects of automa-tion. Vectors and care.
By creating links between different traditions of textile production, while tracing cer-tain social and economic processes, the artist references at once her own experience as well as a more collective, regional memory. She observes signifiers of damage and attempts to repair them. The translation of snapshots into objects becomes a medita-tion on materiality and vulnerability. Miletić’s tactile works depict these snapshots, or rather excerpts. Multiplied and reproduced.
The texture of the yarns and the threads follows the order of the grid, but also dis-torts and swells the latter. Some of the yarns have been dyed by organic pigments using household leftovers: from more traditional ones like beetroot or onions, to more contemporary ones like avocado. The textile manufacturing tradition present in the artist’s family emerges in an embodied way. Invisible hands vanish behind repeated patterns and places, raveled with looms almost as if they were extensions to each other. Covering and protecting.
Hana Miletić (*1982), born in Zagreb, is based in Brussels. She studied Photography at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp and the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam; Art History and Archaeology at the Free University of Brussels; and Gender Studies at Utrecht University. In 2018 WIELS Contemporary Art Centre in Brussels presented her first big institutional solo exhibition. She recently took part in group-exhibitions at the contemporary art museum S.M.A.K., Ghent (2018-19); Metro Pictures, New York (2019); TextielMuseum, Tilburg (2018-19); the 13th Sharjah Biennial (2017) and Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2016). She was a resident at Jan van Eyck Academie in Maas-tricht in 2014-15. In 2015, she was awarded the BOZAR Prize in the framework of the Young Belgian Art Prize.
Notes by Romuald Demidenko, 25 Feb. 2019.
An interview version of this text will be published in Blok Magazine.
Hana Miletić, Softwares, 2019, Jacquard-woven textile (white polyester, white cotton, white cottolin, gray cashmere and black cashmere), 200 x 140 x 0.5 cm
Hana Miletić, Softwares, 2019, Jacquard-woven textile manipulated by hand (white polyester, cream cotton, beige cotton, vanilla cottolin, gold wool-viscose and silk and silver woolviscose and silk) on vinyl frieze, 400 x 140 x 0.5 cm
Hana Miletić, Materiale, 2019, exhibition view, LambdaLambdaLambda, Prishtina
Hana Miletić, Materiale, 2019, exhibition view, LambdaLambdaLambda, Prishtina
Hana Miletić, Softwares, 2019, Jacquard-woven textile manipulated by hand (avocado-coloured cotton, cottolin, nylon and polyester), on vinyl frieze, 41 x 30 x 0.5 cm
Hana Miletić, Softwares, 2019, Jacquard-woven textile manipulated by hand (onion-coloured cotton, cottolin, nylon and polyester), on vinyl frieze, 51 x 30 x 0.5 cm
Hana Miletić, Materials, 2019, Hand-woven textile (berry-coloured cotton, red beet-coloured linen and viscose and avocado-coloured cotton and polyester), on vinyl frieze, 26 x 13 x 1 cm