We are always happy to visit the excellent Museum Rijswijk which, though small, always manages to punch above its weight. Its alternating biennials – paper and textiles – are the high-spots of its annual programme. This year it’s textiles with an international coming together of artists from across the world, all of whom work in the medium of textiles in one form or many others. The 2025 Textiel Biennale is entitled Interwoven Futures.
Textiles have come a long way since I was an art student in London. At the time, at Chelsea School of Art, art students focused on creating new textiles, either in weaves or by designing motifs for printing on cloth, often inspired by music and psychedelic art. Things have changed. On could say that Grayson Perry’s tapestries did much to catch the attention of the general public. His appealing gigantic work, at first sight, appeared fun in their exuberant colours – but many depicted the life of the less fortunate communities, animals, stressed people, even satirising religious leaders, and a gruesome, deadly car crash. In reality they were highly critical of society in general.
In this exhibition Miriam Sentle’s captivating large tapestries depicts the nightmare of daily toil in Belgian, German and Dutch Limburgisch coal mines of her ancestors as they faced not only darkness and explosions but also the fear of encountering the devil dwelling in the black tunnels. Her second piece deals with the dangerous water world of North Sea oil rigs. Though highly illustrative her work touches on myths and memory. I was also intrigued by Kwinnie Lé’s The Land of the Tattooed: Ungodly Beasts, giant hanging drapes, covered in mysterious hieroglyphs, evoking a mysterious maze inside a pyramid or a desert tent.
Is there something new in tapestries being used as a platform for political purposes? Of course not. The Bayeux Tapestry is the most famous and was probably not the first either. In Interwoven Futures almost all the works seemed to have a social or political slant. It seems that the message justifies the means of expression, often dominating the actual piece, pushing the artistic work into the background. The messages of course are very heart-felt and worthy, but for me, in most cases, the use of ‘textiles’ was merely incidental.
There was however a piece which struck a chord with me, the material itself being the message. Turkish artist Servet Koçyigit is much concerned with the now ubiquitous sprawling refugee camps across the Middle-East and Bangladesh. To create his work he used what we know as ‘laundry bags’, the capacious checked woven nylon-zip bags which have become known as ‘immigrant/refugee bags’.
In addition to Kwinnie Lê’s piece, the big gallery on the ground floor is dominated by The Armpit of a Giant or The Juice of a Beetle (2024), a video/audio installation by Anna Hoetjes. In the main gallery upstairs, Cristina Flores Pescorán’s Acariciar el corazón del hueso (2023/4) hangs from the ceiling in dramatic fashion like a fearsome ancient beast or dragon. Astrid Burchardt, 3rd July 2025
Photo by Astrid Burchardt
