Ines Doujak

born 1959 in Austria,
lives and works in London, UK and Vienna, Austria.

The work is exhibited at the Museum on Pańska 3 (until 26.08.2018)

The work started as a collection of 48 Andean textiles, tools, and accessories, and developed into an eccentric archive. The world of indigenous Americas, in which textile culture reached exceptional levels of sophistication and significance, was battered and distorted by the European invasions of the early 16th century. It survived, but the impact of those invasions remains as dirty footprints tainting the production and trade of these objects in the ‘globalized’ world. The archive traces workers' fights against exploitation through time and across geographies. It looks at how types of cloth, dyes, and color are tied up with the history of colonialisms, revealing both their beauty and their ugliness. To stay grounded, the modern figure of the ‘Investigator’ travelled the Andean region, and with the belief that these items in the collection can talk, created posters in response to them, inviting those both close to and far away from the Andes, to communicate with each other.

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