Wool. Silk. Resistance.

With the exhibition, the Museum Angewandte Kunst is dedicating itself exclusively to rugs, carpets, and tapestries for the first time in 45 years. This comes at a time when interest in handmade textiles of all kinds is experiencing a resurgence, reflected in a striking number of international exhibitions.

Rather than approaching rugs, carpets, and tapestries from a stylistic or art-historical perspective, the exhibition presents them within a trajectory that exists outside established Western approaches to textile studies. The title introduces a series of questions: Can resistance be articulated through textile materials? And if so, in what ways do rugs, carpets, and tapestries express an “aesthetics of textile resistance”? The exhibition centers on the perspectives of international artists working in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, who engage with different dimensions of resistance through rugs, carpets, and tapestries understood as open and evolving art forms.