In her lecture the curator and author Rike Frank will speak about today’s boom in textiles in exhibitions and will discuss her research by referencing to her book Textiles: Open Letter, published by Sternberg Press, as a summary of the eponymous exhibition and research project (2010–2014). This evening, the two new releases Textiles: Open Letter (Sternberg Press) and Textile Theorien der Moderne: Alois Riegl in der Kunstkritik (b_books), for which she was the co-editor, will be presented in Graz for the first time. Both books are available at Motto Bookshop Graz at Künstlerhaus KM–.

The increased presence of textile procedures and materials in recent art and exhibition practice raises a number of issues concerning their past and present roles. From a current perspective, textiles—and the history of movements like Fiber Art—are exemplary in the way they call into question the traditional boundaries of genre whose mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion have shaped modern art (history)—be it gender-specific attributions, a favoring of optical over tactile principles, a hierarchy of materials and media, or the divide between discourse and craft.

While on the one hand this reappraisal highlights various interrelations between the different fields—especially with regard to textiles’ exhibition history—the above-mentioned oppositions have (almost) ceased to provide a source of tension for contemporary productions. How has the way we look at textiles shifted? And what functions do they have in contemporary artistic practice?

Rike Frank lives and works in Berlin and Oslo. She is a curator for contemporary art and film and an associate professor for exhibition history, theory, and practice at the Academy of Fine Arts in Oslo. In 2012/2013 she co-curated the exhibition/research project "Textiles: Open Letter," which included "Abstraktionen, Textilien, Kunst" (Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach) and the 2012 solo show by Friedl vom Gröller (HGB Leipzig). She was project director for the documenta 12 in Kassel, curated the European Kunsthalle in Cologne in collaboration with Anders Kreuger and Astrid Wege, and the 2009/2010 program at Ludlow 38, New York City.