BRUSSELS.- Dependencies is Belgian artist Hana Miletić’s largest exhibition to date. The title refers both to her interest in the social agency of textile art and to her work’s reliance on photographic reproduction.

What we pay attention to is dependent on what we care about, on the values that bind or separate us. Miletić represents this insight metaphorically through her choice of medium. Although she was trained as a photographer, she recently turned her focus to weaving and wet felting. The exhibition at WIELS is founded on these works made during the last three years, when Miletić started to take part in communal textile workshops in Brussels. Reconnecting with a craft from her childhood in former Yugoslavia (present-day Croatia), she collaborates with women from different social and cultural backgrounds, who do not share the same language but connect and exchange experience while producing a fabric together – from independent threads and fibres to a close-knit whole.

The exhibition includes four new works – her first large-scale textiles – which Miletić wove on a handloom over the course of ten months. Miletić modeled these textiles after the photographs she took in the streets of Brussels and Zagreb, where she documented makeshift solutions for repairing broken car parts or protecting buildings under construction. After having meticulously woven the fabrics, she artificially applied the marks of damage and neglect of their real-world references. Rather than presenting her instant, photographic “sketches” as artworks, she prefers to give prominence to the extended process of reflection through the weaving that follows.

By confronting the visitor with the intricate bonds between the yarns, Miletić aims to evoke the relationships between working, thinking and feeling. She sees a correlation between the structure and production of these textiles – which requires considerable time and dedication – and certain economic, political and social forces. She explores more particularly the status of “reproductive labour”, a term first coined by the materialist feminist movement of the 1970s. They denounced how care work – a role conventionally assigned to female and migrant workers – is undervalued in patriarchal and capitalist societies. Miletić proposes a need for soft activism, which explores the potential of these material gestures of care to repair the separations between people.

As such Dependencies participates in the programmatic line of WIELS to dedicate monographic exhibitions to critical practices and discourses, and to commission new works. Miletić also engages with the community-oriented programme of WIELS through an ongoing collaboration that she set up with the women of the open art centre Globe Aroma. In parallel with their audio and textile installation txt, Is Not Written Plain, Miletić and Globe Aroma host felting workshops at WIELS in the framework of Kunstenfestivaldesarts and the park festival SuperVliegSuperMouche.