Threaded brings together a diverse collection of textile art by South Asian artists, weaving personal narratives, ancestral memory, and contemporary identity into every fiber. The exhibition is inspired by participating artists, Rachid Koraïchi (b. 1947, Algeria), who has long emphasized the importance of traditional textile techniques in his practice and how he sees these materials and methods celebrated by other Aicon artists. Following Koraïchi’s 2025 trip to New York for his exhibition, which featured new appliqués hand-stitched over four years by artisans in Cairo, we began to pull at this loose thread of an idea and weave it together into a show. The result is a vibrant mix of works that celebrate the myriad ways artists from South Asia and the diaspora employ textile media. 

Khadim Ali (b. 1978, Pakistan) and Shaheer Zazai (b. 1985, Afghanistan) collaborate remotely—whether in Australia or Canada/Cyprus—with artisans from Afghanistan. Ali draws inspiration from the epic story and miniature painting illustrations of the Shahnameh to create intricate designs for his tapestries. The artist produces digital sketches that are subsequently embroidered by Afghan women and are later joined together to create a final composition. In a similar procedure, Zazai makes digital carpets that resemble traditional textiles through a painstaking keystroke process in Microsoft Word. These digital works exist as individual prints, as well as hand-woven carpets made in Kabul. Both artists have embraced the unpredictability of working with artisans from a great distance with little to no communication. There are deviations from pattern and personal flourishes that bring the artisans’ personal histories and identities into the work. These artist/artisan collaborations break down the boundary between craft and art while preserving intangible cultural heritage.

Hangama Amiri (b. 1989, Pakistan) merges sewn fabrics, appliqué, and embroidery to explore themes of home, gender, and the experiences of Afghan women in her homeland and the diaspora. Drawing on the vibrant fabrics of bazaars and domestic spaces of Kabul, her richly layered textiles evoke the fragmented quality of memory and affirm women’s presence in both public and private realms. In Late By Myself (2021), Amiri captures the isolation and disembodiment that came out of the pandemic. Bhasha Chakrabarti (b. 1991, Honolulu) and Thew Smoak’s (b. 1988, Washington, DC) 2022 collaboration, Heartbreak Picnic, takes similar objects—wine bottles, fruit, trays of food—and moves them into the third dimension. Spread across a patchwork quilt, these picnic artifacts mirror the emotional ruin of a relationship. 

Anindita Dutta’s (b. 1973, India) sculpture and performance practice focuses on reclaiming silenced voices, hidden narratives, and buried traumas. In her series Sex, Sexuality, and Society, she explores the dual nature of female sexuality—pleasure and pain. Using found materials like worn clothing, boots, shoes, rawhide, and horns, Dutta calls forth the memories contained in gendered objects that have borne witness to the sexualized experience of women around the world. Suchitra Mattai (b. 1973, Guyana) similarly turns to reclaimed clothing as a central material in her sculptural practice. In and the waves purge the fears (2021) Mattai weaves together vintage saris to create a kaleidoscopic seascape that references the forced migration of indentured Indian laborers to the Caribbean.

In Shehnaz Ismail’s (b. 1946, Pakistan) Haq/Truth (2022-23), silk panels are suspended from the ceiling, resulting in a ghostly presence that responds to the environment of the gallery as people move about the space. For Ismail, by writing the word Haq over a thousand times, “It has become a constant on my thoughts, it finds me, loses me, I obsess with its truth, transparency, purity, humility, layers of meaning, more layers of understanding, it shines as a ray or stronger than the sun. I feel it in the calm and turbulent depths of the ocean. It is a quagmire of mystery that draws me deeper as I try to understand it.”

Azadeh Gholizadeh’s (b. 1982, Tehran) tapestries delve into themes of landscape and memory using traditional techniques of hand weaving and embroidery. While her works may reference real places, the fogginess of visual memory and the conflation of places over time result in a scene that is at once abstract and representational. Purvai Rai (b. 1994, India) also takes her cue from nature, relying on materials such as jute and cotton to generate highly textured surfaces that mimic the topography of rice fields in her native Punjab. The 2020 farmers’ protests along the border of Delhi instilled in Rai the importance of her ancestral connection to the land and emphasized how shifts in farming regulations have impacted the environment, the economy, and the gender wealth disparity in the region. 

Threaded invites viewers to engage with cloth not just as material, but as a living archive of resistance and resilience. Spanning diverse geographies and generations, the artists in this exhibition draw from ancestral techniques, digital innovation, and cross-border partnerships to challenge conventional boundaries between craft and fine art. From intimate explorations of home and gender to collective acts of remembrance and protest, Threaded honors the tangible and symbolic power of textiles.

Threaded is curated by Pam Gendron.