The ‘Forgotten’ Weaver, Erika Tan, Diaspora Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2017 Image © Erika Tan 2025
This event connects with AWARE’s research programme The Flow of History. Southeast Asian Women Artists and questions highlighted by KADIST’s Threads of Kinship exhibition, which departs from the history of the Self-Comb Sisters. Stepping outside patriarchal life, the traces of these women from the silk production industry in Guangdong, China, have largely been erased.
Archives are also lacking in the case of the forgotten weaver Halimah Binti Abdullah, who participated in the 1924 British Empire Exhibition in the United Kingdom — a figure artist Erika Tan explores in a long-term artistic project. A record of this weaver’s work lasts in an incomplete textile on an unfinished loom preserved in a European museum.
In conversation with artist Erika Tan and researcher Aurélie Petiot, the event will reflect on what is missing in dominant narratives, as well as on research and artistic methodologies for reconstituting or reimagining these absences. At the same time, it will critically examine the “present part of the loom,” brought into circulation in a colonial context.
Drawing on Tan’s artistic work and Petiot’s research on Egypt and Palestine under the British Empire, the discussion will consider how microhistories can contribute to a broader understanding of cultural history. Particular attention will be given to the narrative and material potential of textiles, grounded in the labor involved, and to the status attributed to textile and craft in relation to gender and coloniality.
Practical information
Monday, December 8, 2025, from 7:00 to 9:00 pm
Gallery space open from 6:00 pm at KADIST Paris
KADIST Paris
21 Rue des Trois Frères, 75018 Paris
The event will be held in English
Free admission upon registration here, subject to availability
Access the full audio recording here
Erika Tan is an artist whose work has evolved from an interest in received narratives, contested heritage, subjugated voices and the transnational movements of ideas, people and things. Her work arises out of processes of research and responses to the unravelling of facts, fictions, and encounters related to events, locations, audiences and specifics that may already exist. Her work has been exhibited internationally, notably at Times Museum (Guangdong, China 2020); The World Trade Centre (New York 2019); The Diaspora Pavilion (Venice 2017) and Busan Biennale (Korea 2014). Erika’s work has been collected by NUS Museum Singapore, British Council, Arts council England and KADIST.
Aurélie Petiot, a former student of the École Normale Supérieure and a doctor of the University of Cambridge, is a senior lecturer at Paris Nanterre University. Her current work focuses on the history of decorative arts and design education in territories under British colonial rule, with a particular focus on Egypt and Palestine. Through an in-depth analysis of the history of the Cairo School of Arts and Crafts (1908-1934) — now the Faculty of Applied Arts at Helwan — she examines the dynamics of the circulation of motifs and techniques, as well as the mechanisms of their imposition, rejection or appropriation. These processes, which she studies from a critical perspective, contributed to the formation and affirmation of a specifically Egyptian design.
