Textile Exhibition

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The textile intervention by Marlene Herberth investigates archetypes and vernacular symbolism in order to further understand and transpose elements pertaining to the politics of collective identity. Departing from the elementary structure of plain weave, which understands the crossing of warp and weft as the primordial grammar in textile production, the work traces the ways in which communities inscribe difference onto a shared material substrate. Stripes, chromatic codes, ornamental vocabularies and heraldic motifs migrate across geographies and historical contexts, from Balkan shirts and Transylvanian embroidery to kilims, banners or national flags. Traversing the installation are hand-sewn red wool threads, visceral linear interventions that function simultaneously as metaphors for the connective tissue and the wound; they evoke the recurring symbolism of blood as a marker of kinship, sacrifice, violence and regeneration. The presence of the red wool threads destabilizes the autonomy of each individual flag by binding them into a larger, almost anatomical assemblage. Inserted into the textile surfaces, mirrors-amulets activate the work as a relational and performative field. Here the artist has drawn from their protective and liminal function in Romanian, Saxon and Hungarian ritual traditions (from their use in decorating bridal crowns to funerary rites). They transform the installation into a fragmented dispositif of reflection, diffraction and self-recognition. The spectator is drawn into the work, encountering their own image within a matrix of folkloric signs and political emblems.

ALL OUR FLAGS proposes identity as a porous construction, produced through affect and the continual negotiation of the space between self and other.

ARTIST STATEMENT – Marlene Herberth

Across the many cultures of difference, what unites us? At the root of every culture lies a fabric. The simplest of all — plain weave, warp and weft crossing — is humanity’s common ground, the structural alphabet from which all textile languages begin. Upon this shared base, peoples have inscribed their difference: stripes, colours, ornaments, talismans. Red stripes run like blood through history. They appear in huipiles and kilims, in Balkan shirts and Andean mantles, in banners and in national flags. Red marks life and sacrifice, fertility and conflict, the eternal passage from body to body. In ALL OUR FLAGS, red wool threads sewn onto the flags represent the rivers of blood, which we also have in common — a visceral reminder that beneath every emblem lie shared wounds and sacrificial rites of trauma and healing. Through these fragile threads bound together like in an organon, communities survive by passing on an intrinsic language — a grammar of patterns and gestures, of hands at work. Sewn into these fabrics are mirrors. In Transylvanian folklore, they guarded brides in wedding crowns, scattering the evil eye at the threshold of marriage; they shimmered in festive adornments across Romanian, Saxon, Rromani and Hungarian traditions; they were covered at funerals, so that the departing soul would not be caught inside. In ALL OUR FLAGS, the mirrors transform fabric into a polymorphic surface of reflection. Each flag shifts as one moves around it, carrying the folkloric talisman and the political emblem. It is in micro-communal and regional histories that we find how we are ourselves sewn with threads that our hands make visible. How everything we are is reflected by the imaginary “other”, diluting the barrier between the “we” and “they”. These are our all flags: a woven archetype standing for how we are connected, stitched together by plain weaves, red wool rivers and the mirror swarm that protect and remind us that every identity is also a reflection of another.

Marlene Herberth works across artistic and curatorial practices, constructing projects as living systems. Drawing from anthropology and vernacular archives, she weaves ritual, fiction, and political fracture into immersive environments where memory is referenced as inspiration for the future. Working with fragments — objects, symbols, textiles, archives — she builds affective architectures that connect microhistories with collective imagination, activating heritage as an infrastructure for transformation. She is co-founder of KraftMade Research & Lab alongside Alex Herberth, creating heritage-led programs from rural Transylvania, where community, landscape, and history are active collaborators in their practice.

Iris Ordean is interested in local-global networks as rhizomatic organisms and curates in various formats in the expanded field. With a background in cultural geography and critical theory (PhD, Durham University) and art history (MLitt, University of St Andrews), her practice seeks to create transnational collaborations which foster the research of art’s function, as it is experienced outside of the canonical structures of museums and galleries. In the last years, Iris has worked as an independent curator for exhibitions and cultural projects in partnership with international cultural institutes, galleries and artist-run spaces, but also organisations active within the civil society. She is currently Associate Lecturer in Art History, Critical Theory and Aesthetics at Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu.

Artist: Marlene Herberth

Curator: Iris Ordean