To say that textile-based art is having a moment would be an understatement. The medium, once relegated to the margins of art history as craft or domestic labour, is now at the centre of some of the most urgent and compelling contemporary practices. This resurgence aligns closely with a broader global interest in cultural identity, diaspora, and decolonial discourse. Artists from the Asian and Pacific Islander diaspora, among others, are reclaiming and reactivating traditional textile techniques not only to preserve cultural legacies, but also to challenge the Eurocentric hierarchies that long excluded them. These practices become both material and metaphor, articulating stories of migration, resistance, memory, and belonging.
The renewed focus on textiles is far more than a stylistic trend—it reflects a deeper cultural and political shift. Social movements like #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, and LGBTQ+ rights have pushed for greater inclusivity within cultural institutions, prompting museums, galleries, and biennales to amplify voices that have long been marginalised. At the same time, artists from the Global South and diasporic communities have been embraced on the international stage, using fibre and fabric to interrogate imperial legacies, gender norms, and environmental destruction. Visit any biennale today and you’ll encounter outstanding examples of textile-based work. In this context, textiles become conceptual tools that blur the line between art and activism. Their tactility evokes human connection, while their forms carry the weight of place, community, and colonialism. What was once dismissed as peripheral has become central to how we reckon with the past and reimagine the future.
Transfer, curated by Rachael Vance and exhibited at the University of the Sunshine Coast Gallery, is attuned to this renewed focus on textile-based art as a site of cultural, political, and conceptual inquiry. Bringing together eight artists with ties to Southeast Asia, the exhibition positions textiles not simply as materials of choice, but as powerful cultural signifiers. These artists do not engage with textiles passively; instead, they use fabric to articulate and interrogate lived experience and societal issues, and to amplify community voices. The result is a nuanced, multilayered exhibition that feels both deeply rooted in place and globally resonant.
Vance describes the artists as operating “at the interface between cultural inheritance and contemporary subjectivity,” activating textiles to “map intergenerational knowledge and socio-political resistance.” This description captures the dynamism of Transfer, which embraces textiles as more than surface or form. Here, cloth becomes language — stitched, woven, dyed, and embroidered with layered meaning. Each piece exists at what Vance calls “the critical edge” — a volatile threshold where ideologies, identities, and histories intersect and collide.
Upon entering the exhibition space, my own cultural positioning as a white Australian of British heritage immediately casts me as the other. Yet, this sense of displacement is not alienating or aggressive. It is enlivening. The viewer is drawn in, seduced by bold colours, rich textures, and dynamic installations that pulse with energy — at times, quite literally in motion. Instead of presenting an impenetrable wall or adopting an authoritative tone, Transfer extends an open invitation to curiosity, encouraging the viewer to unpack complex and challenging themes. The tactility of the works creates an immediate sensory connection that precedes intellectual understanding. One is compelled to look closer, to follow the physical and narrative threads that speak to experiences and histories far removed from one’s own, yet palpably present in the room.
Thai artist Jakkai Siributr’s immersive installation There’s No Place (2020–present) is a powerful case in point. Developed in collaboration with young residents of the Koung Jor Shan Refugee Camp near the Thai–Myanmar border, the work comprises a series of rectangular, intricately hand-stitched panels suspended from the ceiling, each filled with vibrant, often naïve imagery exploring ideas of home and belonging. The work speaks to the recent violence and displacement faced by the Shan people — most of whom are now stateless — by amplifying personal, often unheard stories from the refugee community. Storytelling here becomes an act of protest, a refusal of erasure.
Arahmaiani’s Flag Project is likewise an ongoing, community-driven artwork that speaks to collective resilience and hope. Initiated in 2006, the project begins with a collaborative process in which local communities gather to discuss and nominate words that represent shared values and aspirations for “a better and brighter future where people coming from various cultures and backgrounds or faiths can live peacefully together.” These words are then hand-stitched onto brightly coloured flags, transforming a symbol often associated with nationalism and division into a vessel for unity, dialogue, and mutual respect. Paired with Ecology of Peace (2022) — a video documenting the communal performance of the flags through rice fields and shorelines — Arahmaiani’s work is at once poetic and political, reminding us that textiles are not static artefacts, but mobile instruments of hope, ritual, and resistance.
Many of the works in Transfer include a performative element—actions that activate, extend, or respond to the textile objects on display. In Moe Satt’s Parasol Alternative (2018), performance becomes both metaphor and method. The work comprises three oversized silk parasols in the colours of the Myanmar national flag — yellow, green, and red — each handmade in collaboration with traditional bamboo artisans. Their surfaces, once torn, have been repaired with zippers, a gesture both symbolic and interactive. Viewers are invited to zip and unzip the parasols, echoing the artist’s own silent actions in the accompanying film. The zippers produce a mechanical, almost jarring rhythm, evoking both rupture and repair, disintegration and potential renewal. In Satt’s hands, these parasols — once markers of power and status — become fragile instruments of critique. They speak to Myanmar’s fractured sociopolitical state, but also to a persistent hope for reconstruction. Here, performance becomes a way of reimagining national symbols, turning acts of mending into quiet, radical protest.
Transfer is a timely exhibition — one that demonstrates how textile practices can be mobilised to speak across cultures, geographies, and histories, fostering awareness and emotional understanding. These artistic and cultural expressions are never neutral; they carry meaning and the power to centre voices that have long been overlooked. The exhibition does not offer easy resolutions, but instead invites us to listen, to feel, and to follow the threads into unfamiliar yet necessary conversations. In a world increasingly defined by conflict and division — and in an art world still reckoning with its exclusions — Transfer stands as both a gesture of resistance and an act of repair.
Rachael Parsons is an Australian curator, educator and academic currently based at New England Regional Art Museum as the Art Museum Director.
