CURA.

Hana Miletić’s new exhibition consists of a series of small handwoven textile works from her ongoing series Materials (2015–), together with a larger work with knitted elements that covers in an almost architectural way a large part of one of the exhibition space’s walls. Miletić has in recent years developed a distinct approach to textile work in which her delicately crafted objects write a different, feminist story of technology and progress stemming from the loom (the forerunner of the computer). The artist has a background in documentary photography, and she is a keen observer of the social realities that often go unnoticed in public space. While the shapes of her textile works, often described as ”patches,” might at first glance seem abstract, they are in fact based on photographs of makeshift repairs that Miletić takes in urban spaces. In this case, the works are based on found repairs of infrastructure, vehicles (such as mirrors, headlights and windows) and architectural elements that were mended in creative, improvised ways.

The large weaving is in a similar way based on a photograph of a covered window of the former Arena Fashion Knitwear factory in Pula, Croatia, which Hana Miletić photographed in 2019. At the time, the factory building was abandoned and awaiting a new destination after a lengthy process of privatization, bankruptcy and liquidation. As a major employer in the city, the dismantling of the factory had dramatic consequences for its predominantly female workers. Miletić included in her large textile work fragments of collected garments from the former Arena brand as well as newly knitted elements – knitting being a new technique for the artist in which she was guided by the former workers. In the exhibition, the textile work is positioned on the gallery wall at a place where it, just like in Pula, “covers” two windows in the Kunsthall’s façade that are hidden from the inside by the exhibition architecture. In preparation of the exhibition, Miletić found similar developments as the disappearing textile industry in former Yugoslavia also around Bergen, with large employers such as the Salhus Tricotagefabrik and the factories in Ytre Arna closing down in the 1980s.

The reproduction of repairs and the weaving of “patchy assemblages” (Anna L. Tsing) are part of Miletić’s awareness for care and reproductive work, which are still undervalued in contemporary societies. Increasingly incorporating recycled fibers to produce her work, most materials that Miletić used for the works are traditionally found in Norwegian crafts (raw wool, flax and hemp), while others have been historically imported (metals and plastics), pointing to the century-old networks of exchange in which textiles are embedded. With the merging of natural and artificial materials, the artist explores ideas surrounding capitalist production and desire, complicating claims that nature is separate from culture while acknowledging the non-innocence in which she lives and works. Miletić weaves to understand the complicated entanglements formed by and between everything and everyone, and to counteract the economic and social conditions at work today, such as acceleration, standardization and transparency. Finally, weaving is for Miletić a way to reconnect with the practice of handwork from her childhood in Yugoslavia that has been passed down through generations of women in her kinship.