Weaving Cultural Identities
to
Estevan Art Gallery & Museum 118 4 Street, Estevan, Saskatchewan S4A 0T4
Dawn Livera and Adrienne Neufeld (weavers), Doaa Jamal (graphic designer), "Find What You Need," 2018
woven cotton warp and Canadian wool weft with supplemental yarn from around the world.
The Estevan Art Gallery & Museum hosts the Vancouver Biennale's Weaving Cultural Identities National Tour.
Weaving Cultural Identities explores reconciliation, multicultural identity and intercultural relations through traditional weaving as a storytelling medium. Graphic artists and weavers from Vancouver’s immigrant Muslim communities and Coast Salish Indigenous communities including Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh were brought together in collaboration to create a series of 10 small-scale “prayer rugs” as a means to share cultural knowledge, reconcile lost heritage, and to discover self-identification through symbolism and traditional motifs.
The project is inspired by global textiles that represent spiritual processes and sacred spaces such as Islamic prayer rugs and ceremonial Indigenous weavings. By highlighting and bringing together this interrelation, cultural narratives and personal stories are celebrated. The textiles uniquely represent immigrant and domestic communities, showing the parallelism that exists between what seems like disparate groups.
The Weaving Cultural Identities project, inspired by the Vancouver Biennale’s theme “re-IMAGE-n" is a multipart project that brings together Indigenous and Islamic communities in a collaborative exploration of weaving traditions and histories. It was inspired by Saudi Arabian artist, Ajlan Gharem’s public art installation Paradise Has Many Gates, a life-sized, chain-link mosque installed in Sen̓áḵw - Vanier Park, Vancouver BC as part of the 2018-2020 Vancouver Biennale. We hope that as this exhibition tours Canada, it be a catalyst for participating venues to invite and engage diverse communities to come together to share traditions and stories- adding to the national dialogue of reconciliation, spiritual healing and cultural restoration. The second phase of this project,Threads Through Time, is set to tour nationally and internationally.