Textile Biennial 2025 at Museum Rijswijk
Fatima Barznge
Céline Berger
Annabelle Binnerts
Elen Braga
Penelope Cain
Oana Clitan
Anna Hoetjes
Afra Eisma
Susanne Khalil Yusef
Servet Kocyigit
Kwinnie Lê
Metahaven
De Onkruidenier
Cristina Flores Pescorán
Ada Maricia Patterson
Oscar Santillán
Miriam Sentler
Jolanda Schouten
Tenant of Culture
Bruno Zhu
Utopias and dystopias have captured the imagination for centuries. In the Textile Biennial 2025. Interwoven Futures, twenty (inter)national artists explore ideal worlds and warning doom scenarios through innovative and inspiring textile artworks. From delicately woven to strikingly colourful, this versatile exhibition presents a colourful array of works about the social and ecological challenges we face.
Monumentally woven carpets, refined embroidered traditional fabrics, textile sculptures and intimate video works depict new futures, different world views and our own position in them. Both figurative and abstract, a wide range of textile materials and techniques can be seen: wool, silk, cotton, jacquard, macramé, embroidered, woven, tufted, digitally printed and hand-painted.
Oana Clitan, for example, shows a hand-tufted, dystopian version of a future that is shaped by both idealism and strict control. Can the state use art to convey a utopian ideology and create myths about urban environments, she wonders.
Artist collective De Onkruidenier rather seeks to connect with nature and speculates through textile uniforms about the possibilities for a new type of human who has adapted to a salty living environment due to rising sea levels.
Céline Berger meanwhile weaves together personal archival photographs of the commune in which she grew up with the labour-intensive macramé technique that she learned there. The fabrics raise questions about preached ideals and the lived experience of this alternative way of life.
The Textile Biennial 2025 in Museum Rijswijk shows a wide selection of well-known artists and young talent, who present their imaginary stories, myths, rituals and fantasies about the world to us from different cultures. Full of colour, criticism, humour and seduction!
