Free entrance
Opening at 18 pm
Museum director Annie Lindberg and curator Emil Nilsson welcome you. Bar and mingling in Birgit Rausing's hall all evening.
“The first computer was a loom. The weavers were the first programmers. Textiles are the basic fabric of the digital.” Amalie Smith
The exhibition “Coded Threads” follows threads from the origin of digital, the web, into today’s and tomorrow’s digital realities. The textile web is the basis of binary coding: the thread can go over or under the warp, be a one or a zero. The thread is coded and takes on meaning – becomes an image, becomes a pattern, becomes a calculation, becomes an algorithm. Everything can become data through the thread in the warp.
Here we present three artists who work with coded threads in their art in completely different ways. All of them allow the artistic process to expand by using self-created or collective systems.
Amalie Smith shows a suggestive installation with digitally dreamed images. Philippa Caesar follows the historical routes of the intercontinental slave trade and the textile industry. In its wake she finds woven threads that are coded with resistance. The Art Group Metahavens Jacquard-woven textile artworks, created with modern computerized looms, can be read as fictional maps or thought systems. For the exhibition, they have created a new artwork with two parallel weaves and moving images. The artwork builds on sketches in the museum's collection.
The exhibition also features several older works of art from the collection. They form an inner processing room, a memory center with possible connections that branch out into the contemporary parts of the exhibition.
The exhibition "Coded Threads" will be on display at Skissernas Museum from December 4, 2025 to May 3, 2026.
Learn more about the exhibition Coded Threads at the Museum of Sketches.
In 2025, Metahaven has implemented an artist residency at Skissernas Museum thanks to generous support from the LMK Foundation.