Artist: Hana Miletić
Exhibition title: Dependencies
Curated by: Caroline Dumalin
Venue: WIELS, Brussels, Belgium
Date: May 10 – August 12, 2018
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and WIELS, Brussels
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, born in 1982 in present-day Croatia, lives and works in Brussels. Miletić first came to Belgium in 1990 and is based there since 2001. She was a resident at
the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht in 2014–15. In 2015, she was awarded the BOZAR Prize in the framework of the Young Belgian Art Prize. In 2016, WIELS and Kunstenfestivaldesarts invited her to participate in the 3-day festival Indiscipline at Palais de Tokyo in Paris. She recently took part in the 13th Sharjah Biennial (2017) and is currently associated artist of the Beursschouwburg, Brussels (2017–21)
