THE MATERIAL TURN

2018

The Material Turn was a group exhibition that brought together international and intergenerational artists working at the intersection of textile practice and digital culture. Co-curated with Kelly Thompson, the exhibition examined how data, often framed as abstract and immaterial, can be translated into tactile, sensory, and embodied forms. Grounded in theories of material thinking and feminist technoculture, the project positioned textiles as a critical interface between physical matter and digital systems. Through processes of weaving, coding, mapping, and material translation, the works rendered otherwise invisible infrastructures: data flows, algorithms, and systems of surveillance into forms that could be seen, touched, and experienced. Rather than treating digital media as disembodied, The Material Turn brought into focus the labour, material conditions, and embodied knowledge embedded within technological production. Textile practices, with their deep histories of craft, repetition, and structural logic, became a means of rethinking how information is produced, circulated, and understood.

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As a curatorial project, The Material Turn extends Hunter’s ongoing engagement with materiality as a site of knowledge production, situating textiles as both medium and methodology for interrogating the relationship between bodies, technologies, and systems of power.

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Artists in the exhibition included: Sophia Borowska, Lia Cook, Emily Hermant, WhiteFeather Hunter, Robin Kang, Ryth Kesselring, Barbara Layne, Janis Jefferies & Studio subTela, Louise Lemieux Bérubé, LoVid (Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus), Heather MacKenzie, Petrina Ng, Ellen Rothenberg, Shelley Socolofsky, Laura Splan, and Kelly Thompson.