British Textile Biennial 2023 at Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery and other venues

Showcasing boundary-pushing artistry from across the globe, the British Textile Biennial returns to Lancashire with a month-long programme of unmissable installations. 

Now in its third iteration, East Lancashire once again plays host to the Biennial, which this year brings together artists and communities from the Global North and South to tell the arresting stories of trade and power, past and present, across continents.

The Biennial’s installation sites hug the Leeds & Liverpool canal – a historic waterway at the heart of the textiles revolution – to tell the stories of this Northern industrial centre and its communities, the British imperialism that helped build it, and the continuing imperial legacy in the Global South today.

Monster sculptures will haunt the historic Tony’s Ballroom as part of Jeremy Hutchison’s ‘Dead White Man’. Constructed from post-consumer garments bound for the Global South, the surreal, totemic figures illustrate what Hutchison describes as ‘zombie imperialism’.

And discarded clothing is also central to ‘Ofong Ufok’, an installation in the Cotton Exchange in Blackburn by Nigerian artist Victoria Udondian. Created in collaboration with refugee and immigrant textile workers in New York, the colossal wall hangings are patchworks of post-consumer waste that will leave visitors in disbelief at the literal and human scale of the issue.

Cotton is at the heart of several of the Biennial installations: In Rossendale, Jacob Cartwright and Nick Jordan’s ‘Larksong’, a new film installation in the chapel, presented alongside drawings, found objects, printed textiles, live performance and spoken word poetry, explores the layered history of Goodshaw Chapel, a non-conformist chapel built in 1765 funded by local handweavers and farm labourers. 

Back in Blackburn, Thierry Oussou presents three hectares-worth of raw cotton on the floor of The Exchange. A striking installation, Oussou collaborated with students and local workers to farm the cotton in Benin, making visible the often invisible labour and land required to supply fast fashion demand.

This present-day clothing colonialism is at the heart of ‘Return to Sender’, a gargantuan installation where second-hand garment bales, typical of those dumped in Ghana, are the sobering backdrop to a film on the trade. Created by Nairobi’s Nest Collective, it highlights the nightmarish irony of the Global North forcing its surplus on West African communities, and in the process destroying the environment and suppressing the local textile economy.

In Blackburn Cathedral’s crypt, keepsakes loaned by members of the public are installed alongside their personal stories to challenge today’s throwaway culture and celebrate the beauty of caring for meaningful items.

At The Whitaker in Rossendale, a major exhibition brings together work by contemporary South Asian artists from Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and the USA to explore our impact on the environment, our relationship to textiles and the fragments we leave behind.

Finally, Christine Borland’s new commission for BTB at Pendle Heritage Centre presents four films cast onto a projection cloth of fustian, a mix of linen warp and cotton weft, woven into the fabric of this medieval cruck barn. Developed through the artist’s intimate engagement with the growing, spinning and weaving of plant fibres, the films reflect on the lives of women in transition from hand working, through mechanisation and industrialisation into the digital age.