SPINDLE Konsthallen Engelska Magasinet, Rejmyre
February 25th–April 15th, 2023
This spring, the Swedish-Belgian artist and musician Oona Libens comes to Rejmyre with her latest project, where she explores the history of weaving and the future of digital technology, spinning a web of connections and perspectives between the two.
An all-knowing spider narrates the story of humanity’s technological development in the exhibition SPINDLE at Engelska Magasinet. Libens’ work revolves around the history of the (moving) image. In her intimate performances – hybrids between abstract object theater and educational documentary – she creates universes made up of fragile mechanisms and analogue techniques.
The starting point for SPINDLE is the link between two seemingly opposite domains: digital technology and weaving. The connection lies in the punched card, an invention that in the 19th century advanced industrial weaving, making it more efficient and complex. The punched card later inspired the first programmable computer, partially designed by mathematician Ada Lovelace, often considered the world’s first computer programmer. In this way, weaving can be regarded as the earliest binary technology. When a thread passes either over or under the warp, it carries zeros and ones, just like the digital language.
In SPINDLE, the archetypal weaver – a spider – engages in conversation with an artificial intelligence. Together, they discuss the history and future of technology, the importance of mysticism versus information, the forgotten traces of textile history – and with them, the history of women’s labor. Libens builds an intricate universe of threads and textile tools as metaphors to illustrate the digital world we live in. In the exhibition space, visitors encounter a large loom-like construction — or is it a primitive computer? Libens employs both old and new projection methods, shadow play, and light effects to create an ephemeral, tactile, and sometimes faltering universe.
SPINDLE is an attempt to visualize the traditionally female-coded technology of weaving as a way to reflect on the often male-coded field of digital technology. The exhibition searches for a new narrative of digital development — one that is more in symbiosis with nature and gives us, as users, greater agency. What might we learn today from the slowness and complexity of weaving?
Visitors are invited to borrow a headlamp to discover reflective details otherwise invisible to the naked eye.
Artist and musician Oona Libens (Belgium/Sweden, 1987) works with the history of the (moving) image. Often starting from shadow theater – the most primitive form of moving image – she also manipulates both historical and modern projection techniques to expose their mechanisms. In doing so, she creates dialogues between old and contemporary media phenomena – from the laterna magica as a pedagogical tool to today’s touchscreens and virtual reality. With her works, Libens seeks to expand the viewer’s experience of the image and the screen, to create an analogue virtual reality and an entertainment machine that is slow, hesitant, faltering, and even failing. Libens graduated in 2012 from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent, Belgium.
For SPINDLE, Libens collaborated with musicians Jürgen De Blonde and Vica Pacheco. The performance Spindle, on which the exhibition is based, was created with support from the Swedish Arts Grants Committee, Helge Axelsson Johnsons Foundation, Region Skåne, and the Flemish Community Council.
Rejmyre Art Lab’s exhibition program is carried out with support from the Swedish Arts Council, Region Östergötland, and Finspång Municipality.