Pacita Abad: Urdir Solidaridades (Stitching Solidarities): Curated by Agustín Pérez Rubio, Museo Reina Sofía, Palacio de Velázquez, Madrid

The exhibition Stitching Solidarities takes an innovative approach to the career of Philippine-born artist Pacita Abad (Basco, 1946 – Singapore, 2004) in which she combines painting and a renewal of the textile technique trapunto, a method of creating quilted and stitched patterns which hails from fourteenth-century Italy.

This technique enabled Abad to lend her large, stretcher-less canvases a sculptural dimension, in which she overlapped fabrics, buttons, prints and sequins to connect with non-hegemonic cultural contexts around which she articulated an artistic grammar rooted in empathy, commitment and solidarity.

Pacita Abad was forced to leave her native Philippines after leading a student protest against the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos (1965–1986). Her exile took her to the USA, where she left behind her law studies to focus definitively on art, which she saw as a catalyst for advancing a profound critical view of injustice on a global scale.

With her husband, the artist travelled and lived in Latin America, Asia and Africa, exploring the problems of the Global South and incorporating into her work elements of Indigenous and traditional culture from around the world which subvert the Western idiosyncrasy on artistic manifestations often considered “ethnographic”.

Through this visual language, she explored multiple emergency political and social

situations of injustice and marginalisation, addressing themes ranging from the political

fluctuations of the Philippines, the situation of immigrants in the USA and traumatic events, such as wars, displacements and “tormentos”, or “storments”, as she defined them, stemming from colonial and imperialist hegemonies around the world.

The show seeks to focus on the sociopolitical connections in the work of Pacita Abad and on her unique way of reflecting barbarity, injustice and the repression of freedom in contexts she encountered and experienced personally.

The Exhibition will travel to MUDAM in Luxembourg and EMMA in Finland.