Kristina Pashkova, Cycles of Connections — Re:action
Arthaus
CCI Fabrika presents a solo exhibition by the artist Kristina Pashkova, Cycles of connections — Re:action. The exhibition will feature a jacquard canvas created by Kristina as part of her residency at the ‘Vaults’, Centre for Artistic Production (2023), the animated video ‘Rubbing Our Eyes’, and a series of performative video installations. As part of the exhibition project, a series of public events — artist talks and lectures — will be held to once again talk about the corporeality of production and the history of the cyberfeminist movement, as well as the subversiveness of textile and weaving practices.
Kristina Pashkova's artistic practice equally addresses both the history of weaving and cybernetics. Her method is based on the connections between women's weaving labour and the very first computer technologies. In her work, Pashkova consistently tests and connects aspects of cyber-visuality with loom and machine weaving.
In Cycles of Connections, the artist refers to the machine process and women's labour associated with it. Pashkova invites viewers to pay attention to the movements in the video, whose simplicity may conceal more symbolism and ambivalence than it seems at first glance. What movements does a weaver make when she spends weeks and months at the machine? How does her body behave as it creates the cloth with the machine? To what extent do her movements really become mechanical, or? The practice of female, invisible labour can contain both the orderliness of work cycles and errors and stoppages that cannot be avoided.
The stop, the mistake, the error, the failure, the wrong step — and our reaction to them — are mirrored in the visual patterns on the jacquard cloth and in the animated video ‘Rubbing Our Eyes’. The textile in the exhibition space reproduces the opposite sensory experience in the viewers: the neuroticism of the movements of its characters and the strict rhythm of the image evoke bodily discomfort and remind us of the reaction to pain and the experience of traumatic events.
The artist's experience of working on a digital semi-automatic jacquard loom and her subsequent reflection on it contributes to a global interdisciplinary network of cyberfeminism, equally attentive to both manual labour and technology.
Kristina Pashkova about the project: ‘Often artists commission textiles from production companies or other craftswomen. I see my work and this exhibition as, on the contrary, the appropriation of technology and the secularisation of such a complex process as jacquard weaving. A cloth of such quality can be woven only in production, where you often have to face the rigid limits of the market (a production will only take an order to weave if the cloth is 300 metres or more). The Jacquard machine (TC2), which stands in the ‘Vaults’ and was invented by Norwegian artists, changes this perception and makes it possible to assign production capacity to the weaver who works behind it’.
Curator: Christina Pestova
Schedule of the public program for the exhibition of Kristina Pashkova Cycles of Connections — Re:action
All events of the program will be held on the Zoom platform. Registration is required. Registration link
February 3, 2025, 7 PM GMT (5 PM CET) — Alla Mitrofanova, lecture ‘Weaving and Programming. Logics and Metaphors in the Ontology of Uncertainty’ (in Russian)
Alla Mitrofanova is a philosopher, cultural critic, art critic, and publicist. Graduated from the Faculty of History of St. Petersburg State University. Participant and co-organiser of the Cyberfeminist International (1997). Co-founder of the Cyber Feminist Club in St. Petersburg (1995). Curator of the Philosophy Café at the St Petersburg Museum of Sound. She lives and works in St Petersburg.
February 5, 2025, 7 PM GMT (5 PM CET) — Artist-talk: Kristina Pashkova (in Russian with translation into English)
Kristina Pashkova (1992, Novomoskovsk) is an artist currently based in Moscow. Kristina Pashkova's artistic practice equally addresses both the history of weaving and cybernetics. Her method is based on the connections between women's weaving labour and the very first computer technologies. In her work, Pashkova consistently tests and connects aspects of cyber-visuality with loom and machine weaving.
February 12, 2025, 7 PM GMT (5 PM CET) — Joži Stolet, lecture ‘Weaving: Intimate Interfaces and New Temporality’ (in Russian)
Joži Stolet is a philosopher, art historian and cyberfeminist. Author of the tg-channel cyberpositive. Born in the Urals in 1986, she lives and works in St. Petersburg.
In her lecture, Joži Stolet will look at the phenomenon of weaving, one of the first complex technologies that for many cultures was and is associated with women. The inclusion of women in the everyday world, as weavers, was a technological inclusion. Technology is bodily and intellectual. It takes strength and engagement to work at the loom. From this coupling, the weaver/operator can be drawn out of this coupling by other forces - the enchantment, the passion of renewing the world. Stepping away from the loom is a way to reinvent the pattern of the fabric.
To invent a pattern, to link many threads into a whole. In a similar way, through language, meanings and contexts are formed, the thinking machine works.
The telecommunication revolution owes much to the evolution of the loom. Sadie Plante has called modern computers ‘the looms of the future’. Invented from observing the workings of Jacquard looms, modern machines have their own ways of weaving the meanings of modernity. Jacques Derrida, in ‘Grammatology,’ writes of some fundamentally new way of linking words that has emerged in the new cybernetic culture. This new way of weaving meanings creates conditions for the emergence of new languages of non-linear (multi) themorality and mysterious zero-objects that virtualise everyday life and act as a way of connecting to contexts, things, and communities.
February 19, 2025, 7 PM GMT (5 PM CET) — Artist-talk: Mika Satomi (in English with translation into Russian)
Mika Satomi is an artist, a designer, and an educator working in the field of e-Textiles, Interaction Design, and Physical Computing. Her work explores how we relate with technology and what we really want in them. She often collaborates with musicians and performers creating technology-embedded costumes and interactive systems.
Since 2006 Mika has collaborated with Hannah Perner-Wilson, forming the art collective duo KOBAKANT creating artistic projects in the field of e-Textiles and Wearable Technology Art. She is a co-author of the e-Textile online database How To Get What You Want. Currently, she lives and works in Berlin, Germany.
She is an honorary professor at the Weissensee Art Academy Berlin. She has been a researcher at the Swedish School of Textiles and at the Distance Lab, Scotland in the field of practice-based design research. She holds a BA in graphic design from Tokyo Zokei University, and an MA in media creation from IAMAS, Japan.
March 1, 2025, 6 PM GMT (4 PM CET) — Artist-talk: Hope Wang (in English with translation into Russian)
Hope Wang is a multimedia artist and creative entrepreneur based in Chicago, IL. Her practice explores memory, loss, and longing in the ever-shifting architectural landscape. She is interested in capturing what always feels out of reach: the last seconds of the sun setting against the factory wall, the smell of asphalt baking in the summer heat, or the wavering space between an open storefront and a shuttered one.
Hope is also the founding director of LMRM “loom room,” a project space working to broaden access to digital weaving equipment for artists in Chicago. She is invested in equitable conditions for working artists, resource sharing, and moving at the speed of trust. She is a recipient of an Artists Run Chicago Grant (2024) from the Hyde Park Art Center, and a Chicago Community Fellowship Fund (2023) from the Breakout Foundation for LMRM’s contributions to the city’s art community. Her artwork has been exhibited throughout the US, which includes the Peeler Art Center at DePauw University in Greencastle, IN, The Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum in Milwaukee, WI, the Chinese American Museum of Chicago, IL, amongst others.
Kristina Pashkova (1992, Novomoskovsk) is an artist currently based in Moscow. Graduate of the Free Workshops (MMOMA, 2021) and the Joseph Bakstein Institute of Contemporary Art (ISA, 2022). Participant of residency programmes Baltic Art Center (Gotland, 2023), WHW Akademija — an independent project of WHW Curatorial Group (Zagreb, 2022), ‘Friends of Vaults’ and ‘ColLab Vaults’ (Moscow, 2023).
