Unravel review – a gorgeously excessive tangled knot of a show, full of blood, pain and pleasure

Barbican, London
From a black jacket that looks like a bat hanging in a cave to a garment stained with the blood of an assassinated Panamanian, this celebration of textile art is ravishing and riveting

A needle piercing an eye, the image sewn with human hair. Another needle through a nipple and a third sewing up the lips to silence them. Detached from the body, human hair can be waste – there’s something abject and awful about hair clogging a sink – and it can be a sentimental keepsake kept in a locket. It can become a thread. You can draw with it or sew with it. In this work, Hong Kong artist Angela Su does both. You need to get up close and you want to step away. She’s giving us something of herself that is filled with pain.

Solange Pessoa’s dropsical, ballooning sacs of earth sag and bulge like bags of guts in a hammock. Magdalena Abakanowicz’s sisal body is suspended from above, as heavy and dark and as cloaked and mysterious as a bat hanging in a cave. A little sewn-up pink woman, by Louise Bourgeois, floats above its shadow, forever falling. Sometimes it is impossible to know what we are looking at: like something between a body part and an item of alien underwear, Xhosa artist Nicholas Hlobo’s Babelana Ngentloko (“they share a head”) trails long tentacle-like ribbons behind a bulging white leather pouch. You could imagine finding this in an aquarium, under a microscope, in a jar in a medical museum or in an exotic lingerie shop. Almost a painting or a relief or a drawing, but not quite any of these things, Hlobo’s work twists itself toward us, as if aware of our presence.

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/esk6I34