Sanctuary, on view at Kunsthaus Graz until October 6, 2024, is Azra Akšamija's first major solo exhibition in Austria and a significant mid-career retrospective. Transforming the museum's domed gallery into a space for reflection and action, the exhibition explores themes of safety, belonging, and resilience in the face of climate crises, migration, and global inequality. Through immersive textile installations and wearable technologies, Akšamija redefines the concept of sanctuary, drawing on her deep engagement with textile art, wearable architecture, and technological innovation. Visitors will encounter thought-provoking new works including "Bishty" (modular wearable architecture), "Hallucinating Traditions" (AI-generated cultural imagery), "Spectacles of the Sacred" (3D glasses reimagined as miniature stained glass), and "Flocking" (an interactive carpet installation that doubles as wearable slippers).
The exhibition recontextualizes several significant projects from Akšamija's career, including "Coring" (2022), which uses stacked discarded T-shirts to critique the environmental impact of the global textile industry, and "Silk Road Works," originally created for the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale, whose delicate glass helmets address migration and transcultural exchange. Throughout "Sanctuary," Akšamija aims to balance aesthetic pleasure with ethical inquiry, blending poetic material reuse with critical global concerns to create frameworks for examining increasingly complex socio-political realities. By reimagining discarded materials and cultural traditions, "Sanctuary" challenges visitors to participate in a collective reimagining of our shared world—one in which creative reuse, community engagement, and cross-cultural understanding become essential tools for building environmental sustainability and social harmony.
Click here for further information about the Sanctuary exhibition.