Free drop-in solo exhibition by interdisciplinary artist Raisa Kabir, with suspended 'loom-house-boat' sculptures and a film, on the textile legacies of Scotland and South Asia.
Raisa Kabir opens a new solo exhibition, House of Stolen Weavers, at Tramway on 20 November, and it stays on through to 16 May 2027. Kabir is an interdisciplinary artist and weaver whose work pulls together textiles, sculpture, video and performance to look at the cultural politics of cloth, textile archives and colonial geographies.
The exhibition is a new commission that makes full use of Tramway's cavernous scale. The space is filled with suspended 'loom-house-boat' sculptures that merge the anatomy of a hand loom with the silhouettes of the colonial sugar ships that sailed the River Clyde and traditional Bangladeshi boats. The installation draws on the intertwined textile legacies of Scotland and South Asia: the Buta, Boteh or Ambi design from Kashmir, which European manufacturers later mass-produced on the Jacquard loom to the detriment of Indian craftspeople; the partition of South Asia; and the post-war migration that supplied labour to British textile factories.
Kabir's ancestral land is Barisal, in the Bengal delta. Coracles filled with cotton, silk, indigo, cochineal, jute and flax hang as references to archival depictions of Indian 'Lascar' sailors, and her research includes two years studying John Forbes Watson's 1866 fabric sample book, The Textile Manufactures of India. The show also includes the film House of the Stolen Weaver.
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It's free and drop-in, so no ticket is required. Tramway is at 25 Albert Drive, Glasgow South Side G41 2PE, and the exhibition runs from 20 November 2026 to 16 May 2027.
