Curated Capsules No.2 - Disconnect to Connect: Contemporary Fiber Art

Textiles are among the earliest forms of human expression, a technology of necessity that evolved into one of the most enduring vehicles of cultural meaning. Across histories, the act of weaving, stitching, or dyeing has functioned not only as a method of making but as a way of thinking about structure, time, and connection. Textile art encompasses a wide spectrum of practices, from weaving and embroidery to felting, knotting, and fiber construction, each grounded in manual repetition and tactile intelligence. Historically associated with domestic labor, these crafts were often undervalued or excluded from the hierarchies of fine art. Yet they have always carried within them a distinct epistemology: one that locates knowledge in the act of making and in the tactile dialogue between hand, material, and memory. Textile, in this sense, is both material and metaphor, a medium that holds time and preserves the traces of collective labor and care.

This layered relationship between craft, materiality, and meaning finds a particularly rich expression in Iran, where textiles have long played a central role in cultural and spiritual life. The history of weaving, carpet-making, and fabric production in Iran reflects not only economic activity but also systems of belief and identity. Persian carpets and embroidered textiles reveal the interplay between aesthetic structure, manual labor, and spiritual intention. Within households, fabrics shape the thresholds of domestic life, defining how space is experienced and remembered. Contemporary Iranian artists inherit these deeply embedded associations, reworking textile traditions into experimental forms that move beyond functionality. Through installations, sculptural constructions, and conceptual engagements, fiber becomes a site for questioning, a way to explore memory, identity, gender, and belonging within rapidly changing social and political landscapes. In these works, textiles cease to be decorative objects and instead become active propositions about continuity, transformation, and the body’s relationship to material culture. 

It is within this lineage that Disconnect to Connect, curated by Shahed Saffari at Liikeh Art Factory in Kashan, situates itself. The exhibition gathers a diverse group of artists, Farhad Ahrarnia, Maryam Ashkanian, Taher Asad-Bakhtiari, Fereydoun Ave, Zahra Imani, Fariba Boroufar, Bita Fayyazi, Mona Jula, Homa Delvaray, Sona Ghaem, Negar Farajiani, Nargess Hashemi, Atefeh Majidi Nezhad, Laleh Memar Ardestani, Afsaneh Modirmani, Shadi Parand, Homa Shojaei, Shirin Mellatgohar, Hoda Zarbaf, and Dorsa Basij, each engaging with fiber as both material and idea. Their practices span handwoven structures, stitched surfaces, assemblages, and installations that challenge the separation between fine art, design, and craft. Housed within a former textile factory in Kashan, a city historically known for its weaving traditions, Liikeh Art Factory provides a site where these practices gain new resonance. In this context, fiber becomes both an object of study and a living metaphor for reconnection, between generations, between traditions, and between forms of labor and creativity. This essay follows those threads, examining how the artists in Disconnect to Connect use textile as a conceptual language through which to think, remember, and reimagine.

Textile production has long been integral to Iran’s cultural and material life. As both a practical craft and a symbolic language, it has shaped the visual and social fabric of the country. Across centuries, it has shaped rituals of birth, mourning, and celebration, mediated trade and social hierarchy, and inscribed collective belief into the fabric of daily life. Practices such as weaving, dyeing, and embroidery have been central to both domestic life and regional economies, sustaining networks of labor and exchange that link material production with cultural expression. In Iran, cloth has consistently operated as more than a functional object, it has been a repository of knowledge where technique and design reflect enduring histories of craft and cultural memory. Each region, such as Kashan, Yazd, Isfahan, Tabriz, developed its own distinctive patterns and weaving techniques, grounded in the rhythms of local labor and trade. Within this vast geography, Kashan emerged as one of the country’s most important centers of textile production. From the silk workshops of the Safavid period to the industrial looms of the twentieth century, the city’s history mirrors the broader evolution of Iranian craftsmanship. It traces a movement from artisanal intimacy toward mechanized production, and from collective labor toward individual authorship.

Beyond its utilitarian role, textile has also served as a medium of storytelling in the Iranian context. Every weave, motif, or stitch contains a narrative logic, reflecting the environments and relationships from which they emerge. In Iranian households, for instance, fabrics often carry personal and collective histories such as inherited dowry pieces, embroidered linens, or fragments of clothing that preserve memory through wear and repair. These objects accumulate significance over time, tracing relationships between maker, user, and environment. Through the slow gestures of weaving or sewing, stories are embedded into material, not written or spoken, but felt and remembered. The intimacy of this process, particularly in domestic contexts, has historically tied textile work to women’s labor and expression. For centuries, such work existed at the margins of artistic recognition precisely because it was intimate and bound to everyday survival. Weaving, sewing, and embroidery followed the rhythms of household life, performed within private interiors and sustained by the expectations of feminine labor. As textile production became embedded in domestic economies, it was increasingly defined through gendered assumptions about care and maintenance. The very qualities that gave fiber its social and emotional depth, its tactile intimacy, its relation to maintenance and repair, also contributed to its marginalization within artistic discourse. It was seen as an extension of women’s work rather than an arena of creative authorship. Within dominant art historical hierarchies that privileged painting and sculpture, textile remained positioned as craft: decorative, functional, and secondary. This classification not only devalued the labor behind it but also reflected broader cultural divisions between the intellectual and the manual, the public and the private, the masculine and the feminine. The feminization of textile work thus became inseparable from its exclusion from the category of art, a boundary that modern and contemporary artists would later confront directly.

By the twentieth century, shifts in industrial production and social thought in the West began to unsettle these long-standing hierarchies of art and craft. Industrialization had already transformed textile from a domestic craft into a large-scale industry, separating labor from the intimacy of the home and redefining its economic and cultural position. Yet even as textile became mechanized, its manual origins continued to shape how it was understood, still coded as feminine, decorative, and secondary to the “high” arts. It was within this context that modern and contemporary artists began to challenge inherited distinctions between art and craft. The tactile, process-oriented nature of fiber offered a critical counterpoint to the formalism of modernism. The medium’s softness resisted monumentality, its repetition defied speed, and its association with the body invited new forms of subjectivity. In the 1960s and 1970s, feminist artists throughout the world reclaimed textile practices as tools of critique and expression. Weaving, stitching, and assemblage were reimagined as acts of resistance to patriarchal definitions of value, labor, and creativity. This reconfiguration did not simply elevate textile to the status of art, it exposed the gendered assumptions that had long structured that distinction. By making fiber central to their practice, these artists transformed it into a language of both personal and political significance, opening new possibilities for how material, identity, and history could be thought through the act of making.

In Iran, this redefinition of textile as an artistic language has unfolded through a different yet related trajectory. While feminist movements in Europe and North America made the politics of gender explicit within art institutions, Iranian artists have approached textile through the intersections of cultural memory, labor, and identity. By integrating fiber into sculpture, installation, and conceptual work, they reposition the medium from the private sphere of maintenance to the public realm of discourse. The material itself becomes a site through which to question authorship and agency. The artists featured in Disconnect to Connect continue this process of transformation, situating textile firmly within the realm of contemporary art. Their works move beyond the functional and decorative associations of fabric to engage with questions of form, perception, and meaning. They use fiber as both material and concept, an instrument through which social, psychological, and spatial relations are examined. For some, textile becomes a material archive, carrying the memory of labor and touch; for others, it operates as a structure through which to reconsider abstraction and space. Across the exhibition, textile is treated not as a fixed category but as a mutable language, one capable of absorbing personal histories and collective narratives. By translating these practices into the context of the gallery, the artists emphasize fiber’s capacity to operate as an intellectual and experiential medium rather than a decorative one. In doing so, they redefine the boundaries of the medium itself, expanding textile from an object of use or inheritance into a site of inquiry within contemporary art.

Curated by Shahed Saffari, Disconnect to Connect presents fiber as a medium of dialogue, between artists, materials, and the historical context of Kashan itself. Saffari’s approach is both archival and experimental: she traces the material and symbolic legacies of textile production while inviting artists to reconsider its potential within contemporary practice. The exhibition’s title captures this dual impulse. “Disconnect” refers to rupture, the dislocation of tradition, labor, and material continuity through modernization and displacement, while “Connect” gestures toward restoration, the act of rethreading lost relations through artistic practice. The exhibition is thus less about returning to craft than about revisiting its logic, reimagining how repetition, repair, and tactility can function as strategies of thinking and making. Saffari’s curatorial framework resists the categorization of textile art as a singular discipline. Instead, it positions fiber as an expanded field through which questions of identity, memory, and form can be examined. The selection of artists spans multiple generations and methodologies, from those who engage directly with weaving and embroidery to others who abstract the material into conceptual propositions. The result is an exhibition that does not illustrate a theme but constructs a conversation, one that bridges manual and intellectual labor, local and global vocabularies, material and metaphor. Saffari’s curatorial approach recognizes that to work with textile in Iran today is to work with history itself: to negotiate a heritage deeply entangled with gender, labor, and spirituality while situating it within the contemporary conditions of artistic production.

The exhibition’s twenty participating artists engage fiber through distinct yet interconnected approaches. Their works can be understood across several overlapping thematic constellations, each addressing a different dimension of textile’s material and conceptual potential. Together, they reveal the breadth of possibilities that fiber holds as both medium and method within Iranian contemporary art.

Material Memory and Labor
Artists such as Farhad Ahrarnia, Taher Asad-Bakhtiari, and Nargess Hashemi explore textile’s enduring relationship to craft, labor, and collective memory. Ahrarnia’s use of embroidery over tactile surfaces reclaims handwork as an act of reflection rather than ornamentation. Asad-Bakhtiari engages the visual language of tribal weaving, translating traditional forms into minimalist and geometric compositions. Hashemi incorporates embroidered motifs drawn from domestic interiors, transforming familiar textures into quiet meditations on everyday labor. In their works, the material histories of weaving and stitching become frameworks for examining how skill, repetition, and touch carry cultural continuity into the present.

Body, Gender, and Intimacy
For Bita Fayyazi, Shadi Parand, Hoda Zarbaf, and Shirin Mellatgohar, fiber functions as an extension of the body and a record of lived experience. Zarbaf’s assemblages of used fabrics and objects collapse the boundaries between domesticity and sculpture, while Parand’s layered surfaces evoke identity and self-representation through process and repetition. Fayyazi’s experimental use of material often introduces tension between softness and structure, fragility and resilience. Mellat Gohar’s textural compositions engage the expressive potential of fabric as a tactile and emotional surface. Across these works, textile becomes a means of articulating embodiment and memory, transforming gestures of care into artistic language.

Structure, Space, and Abstraction
Artists including Fereydoun Ave, Homa Delvaray, Negar Farajiani, and Laleh Memar Ardestani approach fiber through spatial and architectural sensibilities. Their works translate the structural logic of weaving into visual rhythm and form. Ave’s installations merge collage and texture to create layered spatial compositions, while Delvaray’s graphic arrangements evoke movement and tension within patterned order. Farajiani’s material experiments blur the line between architecture and ornament, and Memar Ardestani’s works extend textile into sculptural and geometric abstraction. In each case, textile becomes a system of construction—a way to organize and experience space through pattern, repetition, and balance.

Process, Repetition, and Transformation
Finally, Zahra Imani, Fariba Boroufar, and Afsaneh Modirmani investigate the processual and temporal dimensions of textile. Through weaving, layering, or fragmenting material, their
works highlight the meditative and transformative nature of making itself. Repetition operates not as routine but as inquiry, producing subtle variations that reflect the passage of time and the persistence of labor. Their practices emphasize textile as both method and metaphor—an ongoing process of assembling, undoing, and remaking that parallels the cyclical nature of cultural memory.
Taken together, these artists demonstrate the elasticity of textile as an artistic language. Their works move fluidly between the handmade and the conceptual, between inherited technique and contemporary experimentation. In Disconnect to Connect, fiber becomes a field of research and reflection, one that extends beyond material to engage questions of history, identity, and the structures that bind them together.

Time, Fragment, and Transformation
Artists such as Mona Jula, Homa Shojaei, Sona Ghaem, Maryam Ashkanian, and Atefeh Majidi nezhad engage textile as a temporal and transformative medium. Their works reflect on the passage of time and the instability of form, where making and unmaking coexist within the same gesture. Jula and Shojaei’s layered compositions investigate fragmentation and continuity, revealing meaning in process and incompletion. Ghaem’s methodical, process-based works emphasize repetition and rhythm as modes of reflection, while Ashkanian’s soft sculptural forms evoke memory through absence and imprint. Majidinezhad explores material deterioration and renewal, transforming fiber into a metaphor for persistence and change. Across their practices, textile becomes a record of temporal experience,an evolving surface where gesture, decay, and reconstruction reveal the mutable nature of memory itself.

The site of Disconnect to Connect plays an integral role in shaping the exhibition’s meaning. Located in the industrial quarter of Kashan, Liikeh Art Factory occupies a former textile factory, a space where the histories of labor, production, and material innovation remain physically embedded in its architecture .One of the original textile machines continues to operate within the gallery, serving as a living reminder of the site’s past and its ongoing connection to the city’s identity. Its steady rhythm bridges the gap between the industrial and the artistic, situating the exhibition within a continuum of making rather than a break from it. By hosting contemporary fiber art within a site once dedicated to textile production, the gallery collapses the boundaries between past and present, between craft and art, between the labor of making and the labor of thinking. In this context, the gallery itself functions as a living archive. The spatial memory of production resonates with the tactile and process-based works on display, amplifying the exhibition’s dialogue between continuity and transformation. Here, fiber art returns to the environment from which it historically emerged, but with new intention. Instead of producing textiles for commerce or utility, the artists engage the medium as a tool of inquiry and reflection. The physical space of Liikeh Art Factory, its scale, light, and industrial remnants, inflects how the works are experienced, reminding viewers that artistic practice is inseparable from the material and social conditions in which it occurs. The gallery’s presence in Kashan, a city synonymous with Iran’s textile heritage, thus deepens the exhibition’s resonance: it is not only an exhibition about fiber, but an exhibition made within its historical and cultural home.

Disconnect to Connect situates contemporary Iranian fiber art within a continuum that links material tradition to conceptual innovation. The exhibition demonstrates how textile, once confined to domestic and craft contexts, has evolved into a medium of artistic and intellectual inquiry. Across the participating artists, fiber operates simultaneously as material, method, and metaphor. It holds memory, questions history, and redefines the relationship between labor and art. The tactile intimacy of the medium allows for a distinct kind of reflection, one that values process over spectacle and attention over immediacy. By bringing these diverse practices together in Kashan, a city where textile history is both visible and lived, Disconnect to Connect reclaims material culture as a form of contemporary thought. It reveals how the act of weaving, stitching, or layering continues to structure not only fabric but meaning itself. The exhibition underscores that textile is not a secondary or peripheral art form, but one deeply attuned to the conditions of making, remembering, and connecting. In reimagining the language of fiber, these artists reaffirm its enduring capacity to hold together what is often fragmented, to weave continuity out of change. 

Sources:

• https://liikeh.art
• Parker, R. (2021). The subversive stitch: Embroidery and the making of the feminine. Bloomsbury Visual Arts.

Cover and Slider Image:

• https://liikeh.art