Second Skin: Encounters

The exhibition Second Skin: Encounters emerges from the international research project Interweaving Structures. Fabric as Material, Medium and Message, originated by the Central Museum of Textiles in Łódz (PL), the Doctoral School of the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow (PL), and the Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, University of Bergen.

The project balances artistic and cultural strategies, and at its core, positions and explores textile – as our ‘second skin’ – as a bearer of cultural memory, charged with both anterior and enduring histories, and serving as marker and mediator of lives, past, present, and future.

Second Skin: Encounters materializes the findings of a group of appointed artists from the respective academies, who together, participated in a series of bilateral cultural residencies in Poland and Norway during 2022.

Here they met with a rich multiplicity of artifacts, spaces, people, histories, and narratives, connected through historical, contemporary, and continuing cultures of textile making or production.

These encounters served as points of departure in the reading of the many and disparate textile stories, towards a retelling or interpretation.

The artworks in the exhibition, which employ various media of textile, installation, digital, video and audio art, therefore, represent the individual outcomes to these encounters – the meetings with specific cultural phenomena, an extended process of experience, exchange, cultural discourse, and reflection, and concentrated, often deeply personal, distillation and expression.

Exhibition team:

Curator: Tim Parry-Williams

Co-curator: Marta Lisok

Producer: Andreas Dyrdal

Participating Artists:

Paweł Błęcki (PL), Pamela Bożek (PL), Grzegorz Demczuk (PL), Jagoda Dobecka (PL), Monika Drożyńska (PL), Laika Marie Frandsen Andersen (DK), Wiktoria Gazda (PL),Katinka Halland (NO), Clea Filippa Ingwersen (DK), Agata Jarosławiec (PL), Olga Konik (PL), Marta Krześlak (PL), Natalia Legutko (PL), Piotr Madej (PL), Filip Rybkowski (PL), Ala Savashevich (PL), Live Skaar Skogesal (NO), Kuba Święcicki (PL), Thea Weis (DK).