Conflict Zones: Labor and Cultural Exchange in the Production of Contemporary Art Textile Works

Abstract

In 2014 the Hammer Museum coordinated a cultural exchange: six women contemporary artists traveled from Los Angeles to Afghanistan to work with weavers of traditional Afghan carpets. The designs imagined by the artists were produced by the weavers over a period of months, and the resulting works were exhibited and sold to benefit a women’s charity in Afghanistan. Ham Kyungah, the contemporary South Korean artist, has been exhibiting large-scale textiles since 2008. Ham illegally ships her designs across the demilitarized zone to be fabricated by skilled North Korean embroiderers. Although Ham has never met the workers who craft her designs, they must study her instructional templates—filled with messages that otherwise would have been censored—in order to reproduce them in thread and cloth and send them back over the border. Through such interactions, artists living outside of these conflict zones gain knowledge of and empathy for their inhabitants, and also provide the means for them to earn income and to access cultural content. In the artists’ home countries, the pedagogical nature of the exhibitions enables greater visibility around the lives of women in these other regions, shows the reach and the effects of war, and is meant to enlighten the gallery visitor. However, beyond its financial incentives, the educational “benefit” of the cultural exchange to the relatively anonymous practitioners of the traditional crafts warrants examination. Using highly skilled yet cost-effective labor in producing time-intensive textile pieces—which are then circulated as artworks in the home country—yields a large amount of surplus value, while long-held aesthetic traditions are subject to the influences of foreign artists and curators. I will assess how various aspects of value production within this cultural exchange model function with regard to neo liberal economic structures and to the underlying causes of global conflicts.