The importance of maintaining and revalorizing practices rooted in traditional artistic and craft techniques of analogue photography, embroidery, textile work, and printmaking is at the core of Holding Knowledge<\/em>, a group exhibition curated by Manel Benchabane at Stewart Hall Art Gallery. Featuring the skilled handiwork and conceptually concise practices of Swapnaa Tamhane, Poline Harbali, Jeanette Johns, and Celia Perrin Sidarous, the exhibition weaves together cultural and familial narratives that resist the contemporary urge for globalized rapidity, easily consumable goods, and thoughtless doomscrolling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Proximity, patience, and repetitive care are but some of the many values espoused throughout the exhibition. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Harbali\u2019s series of five Syrian Aghabani tablecloths that belonged to her family, which she has marked with her own embroidery, representing a series of meals she would like to have with close ones, both imaginary and real. Highly graphic, brightly colourful, and above all else playful, the pieces in Repas imaginaire ou pass\u00e9 <\/em>(2023) are wonderfully intricate and a treasure trove of poetic imagery and words. Embroidered sentences such as \u201cj\u2019avais une urgence dans le corps [i had an emergency in my body]\u201d convey this central sense of multigenerational knowhow that ebbs and flows from the tablecloth, a precious family heirloom imbued with imagination, beauty, and history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Whereas each of Harbali\u2019s tablecloths maintains an individualized, imperfect, and charmingly scribbly sense of the hand-embroidered, Johns\u2019s loom work adheres to a strict geometry and patternmaking that evokes other traditions of making. Using her grandmother\u2019s loom, Johns translates the creative logic of printmaking to textiles. In each of her dazzlingly mesmerizing patterned pieces, she explores the relationships between a shadow weave\u2014which she found in a sample book of her grandmother\u2019s\u2014and contemporary weaving software that has allowed her to complexify this original structure. Woven pieces such as Start and end with a sample<\/em> (2024) and printed works such as Test Weavings<\/em> (2024) push the boundaries between analogue and digital technologies to meld and distort preconceived notions about their distinctiveness and opposition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is in these moments of tension, between the irregularity of Harbali\u2019s tablecloths and the serial perfection of Johns\u2019s patterns, that Holding Knowledge <\/em>best relays the wide array of tactile and intellectual knowhow that is passed on across time and people. In Tamhane\u2019s When was Modernism? <\/em>(2024), this clash between past and present, handmade and industrialized, is made explicit. Impressively stretching across the main gallery, the piece replicates the worktable of the artisan-designer Salemamad Khatri, which acts as a support for an achadiya<\/em>, a protective drop cloth used during printing. Picking up on a process of transference\u2014of colourful inks bleeding through countless projects to create new, unanticipated combinations\u2014Tamhane\u2019s work speaks to cotton\u2019s legacy in India as an anticolonial tool. By asking women from the semi-nomadic Dhebariya Rabari community in the Kutch region of Gujarat state to apply embroidery and appliqu\u00e9 to specific areas of the drop cloth, Tamhane also recentres the work on the labour of women. Although not explicitly stated in Holding Knowledge, <\/em>the ways in which women have predominantly held onto and transmitted these types of invisible and invisibilized knowledges is an obvious theme of the exhibition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Moving away from the tactility of threads and textiles, from the abstraction of geometry and patternmaking, Perrin Sidarous\u2019s exploration of analogue photography brings a more figurative element to the exhibition. Creating a series based on archival documents, objects, and family lore\u2014more specifically, reshooting her uncle\u2019s snapshots from the 1980s, family photographs from Cairo in the 1940s, and a 1907 book titled Sepulchral Monuments of Ancient Egypt<\/em> borrowed from her aunt\u2014she builds an archaeological missive that melds major, capital-H History with more personal and embodied histories. In her black-and-white images, the collaged and fragmentary nature of the composition gestures toward a kind of incomplete knowledge. <\/p>\n\n\n\n These gaps speak to the difficulties, and sometimes the impossibility, of imparting knowledge, and to the inevitable loss that comes with the passing of time, immigration, disaster, war, and other humanmade phenomena that hinder transmission. With all this detail and delicacy, Holding Knowledge <\/em>repeatedly asks its audience to step closer to the work, as though the knowledge on display might be transferred to those in the gallery. To quote Benchabane in her curatorial essay, these artists \u201crevisit unknown or incomplete narratives based in memories, the quest for knowledge, and dreams.\u201d This act of openly sharing feels both cultural and political, addressing the fissures in the connective tissue that binds us while simultaneously seeking to mend it through practices rooted in familial and multi-generational bonds among women around the globe.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/07\/web_Juillet_Morelli_Prendre_Empreinte_par_Alexis_Bellavance-19.jpg\")
Repas imaginaire ou pass\u00e9<\/em>, 2023, installation view, Stewart Hall Art Gallery, Montr\u00e9al, 2024.
Photo: Alexis Bellavance, courtesy of Stewart Hall Art Gallery, Montr\u00e9al<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/07\/web_Juillet_Morelli_Prendre_Empreinte_par_Alexis_Bellavance-44.jpg\")
Test Weavings<\/em>, installation view, Stewart Hall Art Gallery, Montr\u00e9al, 2024.
Photo: Alexis Bellavance, courtesy of Stewart Hall Art Gallery, Montr\u00e9al<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/07\/web_Juillet_Morelli_Prendre_Empreinte_par_Alexis_Bellavance-38.jpg\")
(in collaboration with Salemamad Khatri (artisan-designer) & Jasuben Prabhu, Madhuben Vana, Jivaben Rupa (Dhebariya Rabari community, Qasab Kutch Women’s Collective)
When was Modernism?<\/em>, installation view, Stewart Hall Art Gallery, Montr\u00e9al, 2024.
Photo: Alexis Bellavance, courtesy of Stewart Hall Art Gallery, Montr\u00e9al<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/07\/Prendre_Empreinte_par_Alexis_Bellavance-1.jpg\")
Des \u00e9clats,<\/em> installation view, Stewart Hall Art Gallery, Montr\u00e9al, 2024.
Photo: Alexis Bellavance, courtesy of Stewart Hall Art Gallery, Montr\u00e9al<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n