Sanctuary Looms

August 09, 2020 in 2020

This immersive installation was developed for the “Sanctuary” exhibition at the Aga Khan Museum Toronto. The exhibition explores the notion of the safe haven, featuring 36 carpets created by notable international artists, including Mona Hatoum and Brendan Fernandes. Our immersive installation spans the entire gallery space, deploying thousands of shredded T-shirts, which were turned into loom-like spatial dividers. The exhibition architecture weaves the artists’ perspectives with the consumerist economy in which we participate and exist. The stainless-steel loom beams conjure images of retail warehouses and mass waste. The warp and the weft, made of shredded T-shirts, point at the fast-fashion overstock awaiting destruction at the end of the season. This second-life-themed exhibition architecture probes the social value of our waste: All exhibition materials will be recycled after the exhibition and made into carpets as sofreh (food offering). They will be gifted to new immigrants of Canada as portable “living rooms,” to welcome their arrival to a new homeland. The material narratives of sustainability yarn a perspective on the notion of the Sanctuary: to become less indifferent to the social costs of maintaining our lifestyles means to become more open to the voices of others, not as a negotiating technique, but as an indispensable part of our plant’s chorus.

Exhibition curators: Cheryl Haines, FOR-SITE Foundation and Michael Chagnon, Aga Khan Museum, Exhibition design: Future Heritage Lab, Artistic director: Azra Akšamija, Research and design team: Natalie Bellefleur, Lillian Kology, Exhibition photos: Toni Hafkenscheid ©Aga Khan Museum, 2020.
Process Drawing: Future Heritage Lab
Research and design team: Natalie Bellefleur, Stratton Coffman, Isadora Simone Stahl Dannin, Emily Jane Wissemann
Al Azraq Camp Photographs: Future Heritage Lab (FHL)
Principal Investigator and artistic director: Azra Akšamija, Research team: Zeid Madi, Melina Philippou, Photos by: Zeid Madi and Nabil Sayfayn (FHL) and Al Azraq Journal team: Hussein Al-Abdallah, Yassin Al-Yassin, Mohammad Al-Qo’airy, Mohammad Al-Mez’al, 2017. Cheryl Haines, FOR-SITE Foundation and Michael Chagnon, Aga Khan Museum
Exhibition design: Future Heritage Lab
Artistic director: Azra Akšamija, Research and design team: Natalie Bellefleur, Lillian Kology, Exhibition photos: Toni Hafkenscheid ©Aga Khan Museum, 2020.
Photos by: Zeid Madi and Nabil Sayfayn (FHL) and Al Azraq Journal team: Hussein Al-Abdallah, Yassin Al-Yassin, Mohammad Al-Qo’airy, Mohammad Al-Mez’al, 2017.

Exhibition design, immersive installation
Commissioned by the Aga Khan Museum Toronto, with MIT Future Heritage Lab
Materials: Over 2,000 shredded cotton T-shirts, stainless-steel beams
Dimensions: variable

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Process Drawing

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This drawing explores the world through the lens of a cotton T-shirt, depicting three parallel narratives. The first story (green) traces the environmental footprint of T-shirts through the resources and the pollution that are part of its manufacturing process. The second plot (blue) examines the technologies of the T-Shirt production, from the cultivation of the cotton plant and the associated history of slavery to the industrialized fabrication […]

Operant Conditioning

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