Textiles constitute one of humanity’s oldest and most sophisticated technologies, yet their complexity is routinely obscured. They reach us as finished objects whose surfaces conceal the ecological, material, and embodied processes through which they come into being. In philosophy and literature, textiles are frequently reduced to metaphors of text, interconnection, or social fabric thereby abstracting them from the material ecologies, labor histories, and technological systems that constitute them. Activating Material Memory counters this long-standing abstraction by revealing the textile as a living micro-ecology: an entanglement of botanical matter, environmental forces, embodied labor, and infrastructural tools. This exhibition presents data weaving with cyanotype treated threads exposed to environmental conditions to make visible the distributed agents that participate in textile production, producing artworks that register the intra-action of body, loom, light, time, and environment.
This exhibition by Hayri Dortdivanlioglu, Postdoctoral Fellow at Society of Fellows, Department of Studio Art, is on view in the Nearburg Gallery, Visual Arts Center, from Sept. 15 to 30, 2026.