Hana Miletić’s exhibition “Materiale” features an automated work, automated works
manipulated by hand, a hand-woven work using the experience of automation for its
production, hand-dyed works, both hand-woven and automated. Automated and manipulated.
Miletić’s works evoke different traditions and practices of tangibility and care, spanning
from handmade production to the delegated work of automation. The works are
informed by images of reparations found in public space, which are at the same time
signs of scarcity and gestures of maintenance. The artist translates these signs and
gestures into the medium of handmade and automated weavings. Thereby she constructs
considerate installations by interlacing seemingly unrelated threads: from
urban photography to textiles, to households and to overlooked aspects of automation.
Vectors and care.
By creating links between different traditions of textile production, while tracing certain
social and economic processes, the artist references at once her own experience
as well as a more collective, regional memory. She observes signifiers of damage and
attempts to repair them. The translation of snapshots into objects becomes a meditation
on materiality and vulnerability. Miletić’s tactile works depict these snapshots,
or rather excerpts. Multiplied and reproduced.
The texture of the yarns and the threads follows the order of the grid, but also distorts
and swells the latter. Some of the yarns have been dyed by organic pigments
using household leftovers: from more traditional ones like beetroot or onions, to more
contemporary ones like avocado. The textile manufacturing tradition present in the
artist’s family emerges in an embodied way. Invisible hands vanish behind repeated
patterns and places, raveled with looms almost as if they were extensions to each
other. Covering and protecting.
Hana Miletić (*1982), born in Zagreb, is based in Brussels. She studied Photography at
the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp and the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam;
Art History and Archaeology at the Free University of Brussels; and Gender Studies
at Utrecht University. In 2018 WIELS Contemporary Art Centre in Brussels presented
her first big institutional solo exhibition. She recently took part in group-exhibitions
at the contemporary art museum S.M.A.K., Ghent (2018-19); Metro Pictures, New
York (2019); TextielMuseum, Tilburg (2018-19); the 13th Sharjah Biennial (2017) and
Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2016). She was a resident at 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.
Notes by Romuald Demidenko, 25 Feb. 2019.
An interview version of this text will be published in Blok Magazine