Future Past

22-26.09.2025

“Future Past” brings together artists from across the globe whose work explores the conflicted relationship between humans and the universe through textiles, along a sliding scale of power and resistance.

Born from a collaboration between TCN and the 25th edition of the British Textile Biennial (BTB), the exhibition addresses this year’s curatorial focus: the industrial production of synthetic cloth in the last century, its devastating impact on environment, and what we might learn from indigenous practices before it’s too late.

Curated by Laurie Peake, BTB’s Artistic Director, it presents a range of artistic responses across cultures and continents, examining that impact from personal perspectives or proposing speculative alternatives. The works reflect on how colonising powers endangered societies and their knowledge in their determination to commandeer the universe’s resources in a race to dominate land, sea, and sky.

Nominated by Zoe Yeh (Hong-gha Museum):

‘In Taiwan’s industrial past, cloth wheels were essential tools—used to polish wood, metal, and stone. Spinning day and night in factories, they shaped materials and bore the weight of labor.
Artist Yang Wei-lin collects these worn-out, discarded buffing wheels and gives them new life. Each one is carefully disassembled, layer by layer, and hand-dyed with natural indigo. Once used to grind and smooth, they now float—soft, rippling, transformed.
Assembled into drifting forms, the cloth wheels become floating islands in space. In varying depths and shades, they seem to turn from the ocean and gaze back at the land. These islands reflect the drifting, uncertain state we share in this post-industrial world. Step into this immersive sea of blue. Let the scent of indigo, the swaying motion, and the quiet light carry you into a dream—where labor becomes light, and the discarded is reborn.

ancestral memory, displacement and power relations

Some artwoks trace unbroken chains of indigenous knowledge and its deep connection to land, or revisit histories of displacement and power.

Nominated by Wumen Ghua:

Café Disorient is an ever-changing traveling installation made as a treasury of Palestinian collective memory by Susanne Khalil Yusef. Always painted with the fishnet pattern of the kufiya, it invites visitors to sit under a glowing neon light of Handala - the barefoot child refugee who can only grow up once he returns home. Yusef shares Arabic coffee with guests, chatting about life before it’s gone. Harpy the Flying Carpet, a life-sized textile tapestry of an Israeli military drone, reimagined as a soft flying carpet with the protective blue eye of Fatima. By weaving military form and Semitic folklore,Yuself reclaims the narrative of the Palestinian struggle. In her portrait, she echoes Handala’s pose, without revealing her face, her anonymity is deliberate, like Handala, she becomes a universal symbol, representing millions of refugees and displaced people.

Nominated by Jill D’Alessandro (Denver Art Museum):

For Kiowa artist Teri Greeves, beadwork began the moment that she was born. In Sons of the Sun she uses stories from Kiowa cosmology, centered on the Half Boys, holy beings whose exploits teach valuable lessons and offer guidance to their community.
Greeves illustrates the boys flanking their Mother; their Father, the Sun, is depicted as an abstraction behind them. For her dye baths, she gathered materials from the northern US (Montana and Wyoming) and the southern US (Oklahoma), symbolic of Kiowa’s 17th century migration from territories in Montana to their current location in Oklahoma. Through beadwork Greeves expresses herself and her experience as a 21st Century Kiowa - like all those unknown artists before her.

material experimentation and SPECULATIVE futures

Others turn toward the future, asking what ethos should guide the making of clothes, imagining languages where fashion merges with nature, questioning the ecological cost of industries such as rubber, or projecting monumental forms that echo cosmic exploration and science fiction.
Performance and installation evoke the labour once required to transform raw matter into textile, exposing the capitalist drive of industrialisation, while discarded plastics reappear as weaving fibre, suggesting that even what is most artificial can be reabsorbed into cycles of creation, resistance, and renewal.

Nominated by Textiel Museum:

Jewellery and textile artist Caroline Bach (1995) grew up outside Clermont-Ferrand in central France. The area owes its prosperity to tyre manufacturer Michelin.
Many plant species produce natural rubber latex, but most of it comes from the rubber tree. This tree originally grew in the Amazon region. Today, the tree only grows in Southeast Asia where it was introduced by colonisers.      
Materialisation explores the origins of the city's wealth. Bach discovered what rubber is, how it is extracted, how a tyre is made and the impact of the rubber industry on people and the environment. She translated these insights into six educational body jewels, each designed to confront the wearer with different aspects of rubber production.  

Nominated by Bukola-Oyebode Westerhuis:

Sandy Van den Brink’s work aligns with new developments challenging traditional fashion norms through innovative digital creativity. It bridges the gaps between self-expression, identity, historical erasure, language, and ethical concerns. Featured in this presentation is a work that represents her digital fashion projects rooted in curiosity, fascination, and catharsis, and aimed at amplifying the voices of people who have long been denied agency over their representation. Titled Fruits of Preservation, it embodies the cultural heritage of Kunukeros, local farmers on the ABC Islands, who live and tend the land primarily in indigenous ways. The collection memorialises their ideologies, methodologies and the richness of their aesthetics.

Nominated by Central Museum of Textiles:

C.T. Jasper and Joanna Malinowska in 2009 in New York City prepared a performance combining music, literature, film, scenography and costume design. Project Mother Earth Sister Moon referenced a Soviet-era visions of cosmic conquest, and took inspiration from science fiction films, books, posters, magazines, as well as fashion and music from Eastern Europe where space travel had featured in Communist propaganda.
Similar to the sculpture by Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely Hon – en Katedral (She – A Cathedral), the artists built a giant cosmonaut suit inspired by Valentina Tereshkova`s (the first woman in space) suit. Thirty-eight other costumes were presented in performative fashion shows that took place inside.

Nominated by Lottozero:

Flax, baby! Flax! reimagines the labor-intensive transformation of flax into linen fibers as an experimental operatic performance, where text, song, gesture, sound, and movement intertwine in a hypnotic flow. Developed over three years of research into historical labor practices and work songs, the libretto emerged from workshops led by Liza Prins, Marie Ilse Bourlanges and composer Bergur Anderson, weaving themes of solidarity, feminist and class consciousness, care, and protest.
The four acts mirror the stages of flax processing: rippling, breaking, scutching, and heckling, while sculptural pre-industrial flax tools serve both as musical instruments and spectral reminders of the process’s brutality, extending to the performers’ bodies. The piece establishes a cross-historical dialogue about work conditions, desires, capitalist modes of production, and the fragile balance between political agency and disempowerment.

Nominated by CHAT (Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textile):

Weaving the Ocean began with the idea of replacing vanishing natural materials with new, commonly available ‘natural’ materials. Ari Bayuaji discovered an abundance of plastic ropes tangled in tree roots on Bali’s coast. These ropes, appearing as an organic part of the trees, inspired him to repurpose them as weaving material.
In early 2020, during the pandemic, Bayuaji recruited two local assistants to help unravel and clean the harvested plastic ropes, turning them into fine, colourful threads. He then wove the threads into abstract artworks at a small traditional Balinese weaving workshop, which had already been economically vulnerable before the pandemic. The project has since expanded to include over 15 collaborators, not only supporting those affected by the pandemic but also educating people in Bali and beyond about environmental sustainability.

British textile biennial

British Textile Biennial (BTB) is a free festival of contemporary art, commissioning artists and designers from all over the world to make work inspired by the context and legacy of the textile industry in East Lancashire and its global impact, often in the places that were created by it.

British Textile Biennial (BTB) this year explores invention and innovation in textile production; through indigenous knowledge to space-age technology, from the earliest form of shelter, the tent, to space suits, and from plant-based dyes to the first polymers.
With artists and designers, BTB25 revisits the textile pioneers of 20th century Lancashire inspired by a bold vision of the future that revolutionised our lives. However, these developments pushed the planet and its resources to extremes, so any future advances must look at ways to reset it and learn from a distant past that is almost lost to us.

BTB25 takes place from 2nd October – 2nd November 2025

www.britishtextilebiennial.co.uk