Kristina Benjocki - Weaving Resilience
The exhibition Kristina Benjocki. Weaving Resilience brings together the gendered associations of weaving to make tangible both trauma and healing processes. In the context of her biographical background, Benjocki uses textile art to navigate memory and history, craft and industry, making and thinking, and to show the threads of human resilience.
Kristina Benjocki. Weaving Resilience is the first solo museum exhibition in the Netherlands by Benjocki (Zrenjanin, former Yugoslavia, 1984). The exhibition brings together her most important textile works and includes the large-scale textile installations Study of Focus (2014), Ground Bindings (Nada, Gizela, Tereza) (2019), TABLEAUX VI-VII, La Composition (2022) and Writing the Unspeakable (2024). In addition to textiles, a new series of works on paper will be on show.
The artist has lived in the Netherlands for almost 20 years, but grew up in Zrenjanin, one of the largest textile-producing cities in the former Yugoslavia, now Serbia. The tradition of weaving is closely linked to how previous generations of women in Benjocki's family managed to survive. Working with yarn was crucial for supporting their families as single mothers in different times: during World War II, during the time of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and after its violent disintegration.