Raisa Kabir, NO PROTECTION, 2020, Yarn, wool, and cotton, 20 x 24 x 4 inches each panel
Click the button below for the audio and text of the VISUAL DESCRIPTION for Raisa Kabir’s NO PROTECTION:
Raisa Kabir (b. 1989) (she/they) is an interdisciplinary artist and weaver based in London. Kabir utilizes woven text/textiles, sound, video, and performance in their work to materialize concepts concerning the cultural politics of cloth, labor, and embodied geographies. Their (un)weaving performances comment on power, production, disability, and the queer brown body as a living archive of collective trauma.
Kabir examines how some bodies are more valued by and for global structures of production. They interrogate the eugenic-capitalist logic that prizes young, able-bodied persons; extracts their labor at a disabling pace without the most basic support structures of healthcare, rest, and safe food and housing; and then discards them as disposable. Kabir uses textile production in her work to cite these structures, as we see in her eponymous sculpture NO PROTECTION. What do we do, Kabir asks, when we cannot look to the world around us for care and safety?
NO PROTECTION protests the pervasive and persistent failure to protect queer, trans, and disabled people of color from harm. Kabir writes that NO PROTECTION “…takes root from disability, queerness, dysfunction, and inability to process unspeakable things that were inherited trauma. It is about mourning all the times we were failed by those who were meant to protect us from harm. A collective voice – a personal action.”
Kabir also reclaims the output of weaving as allegory for, in Kabir’s words, “the ways in which marginalized communities rely–and have always relied–on support networks of care and structures of mutual aid to survive that are separate to the state.” In Kabir’s woven sculptures, the intertwined threads of weaving signify the interdependent care on which disability depends. These interrelationships are made visible and perform a disability aesthetic that resists commodification and individuation in Kabir’s House Made of Tin (a socially distanced weaving performance) commissioned for Chapter 4 of Indisposable: Structures of Support after the ADA.
Through an open call, Kabir organized and documented a public weaving performance in October 2020 created, by, for, and from BIPOC, disabled, queer, and trans participants. The result was a geometric textile sculpture created through interdependent action and care. By embodying these structures of support and mutual aid, the performance asks us to consider how labor and care are connected across all bodies and borders. In doing so, House Made of Tin (a socially distanced weaving performance) underscores a key precept of disability justice that, in Kabir’s words, “is dependent on wider society believing in, and participating in, creating access for all.” The woven sculpture collectively created by the participants evokes the bonds created that day that are figurative, literal, and ongoing; these connections reflect lessons the crip community has always had to offer others about how to joyfully connect, support, and survive.
Instagram: @raisa_kabir_textiles_
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