Gallery Two, Chicago
Western Exhibitions is pleased to present our first show with Sukaina Kubba, Textile Museum. Sukaina Kubba’s work is strongly rooted in material and cultural research, storytelling, and drawing connections as she traces and translates textile designs, drawings, and archives in hand-drawn objects made using 3D printing filaments. For this show, Kubba’s new hand-drawn filament sculptures trace, through deep research, the history of lace making from its handmade roots through the industrial revolution of machine-made textiles to the use of synthetic materials being used today. Please join us for an opening reception on Friday, April 18, from 5 to 8pm. The show runs through June 7 and gallery hours are Tues-Sat, 11am to 6pm.
In Textile Museum, Sukaina Kubba presents new works inspired by lace artefacts from the digital collection of the Textile Museum of Canada. The artefacts that inspire these new hand-drawn filament sculptures were collected from Europe, North America and South Asia and consist of a variety of textile objects such as: handkerchiefs, lace edging, fragments, a lace kit case and a false shirt. Made between the early 19th century and mid 20th century, the lace objects are mostly hand-embroidered but some display early methods of industrial production, such as mechanical loom weaving and machine sewing. Textile Museum is the first in a series of works in which Kubba researches and references lace making as a craft that has shifted from a product of artisan, family based and cottage industry labour using agricultural materials such as cotton and linen, through a transformation in the industrial revolution using jacquard looms and sewing machines, to the synthetic revolution with the use of nylons and other petrochemical materials as well as minimized labour.
The title of show plays an ode to Toronto-based Textile Museum of Canada that opened in 1975 and is undergoing a temporary closure and an uncertain future due to increasingly precarious arts funding. Since 2020 Kubba has used the online and physical Collection at the Museum extensively to research, draw and explore textile artefacts.
Sukaina Kubba is an Iraqi-born Toronto-based multi-disciplinary artist whose work is rooted in material and cultural research, material experimentation, storytelling and drawing connections. Kubba’s work has been included in Toronto at Patel Brown (2024), Greater Toronto Art Triennial at MOCA (2024), Mercer Union SPACE Billboard Commission (2023-24), the plumb (2023), The Next Contemporary (2023), Art Gallery of Ontario (2019), Aga Khan Museum (2017); and in Scotland at Dundee Contemporary Arts (2024), Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow (2016), Glasgow International (2016 and 2014) and Kendall Koppe, Glasgow (2013). She has upcoming exhibitions at Patel Brown, Montreal (Feb 2025) and Carleton University Art Gallery, Ottawa (Jan 2026). Kubba has recently completed residencies at the International Studio and Curatorial Program, New York and La Wayaka Current, Chile. She is a sessional lecturer in Visual Studies at the University of Toronto, and was previously a curator and lecturer at The Glasgow School of Art (2013–2018).