Sukaina Kubba: Turn Me Into a Flower

27 Apr-4 Aug 2024

Overview

Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA) is delighted to present the first solo exhibition in a UK institution by Sukaina Kubba from Sat 27 April – Sun 4 August 2024.

Kubba is a multidisciplinary artist whose work is strongly rooted in material and cultural research, storytelling, and drawing connections. The artist works with industrial and packaging materials, and explores travelling objects, textiles and vehicles as carriers of cross-cultural histories. Her practice spans the mediums of drawing, painting, printmaking, fibres, audio, video and installation, and explores narratives of cultural and material assimilation and appropriation.

For this major new solo exhibition at DCA, Kubba will present existing works alongside new commissions created during a month-long production residency in DCA Print Studio in January 2024. During her residency at DCA, Kubba visited several Scottish collections of carpets and textiles, including the Stoddard-Templeton Design Archive at the University of Glasgow; the National Museum of Scotland; and Morton Young Borland Lace Mill in Ayrshire.

These new works in print will be displayed across Gallery 2, ranging from paper pulp casting, embossing and laser engraving to screen prints made on DCA’s large-format press, one of the biggest in Scotland’s printmaking studios. Working on an ambitious scale and largely in monotone, Kubba has created a number of works to be suspended from the ceiling. They will sit alongside work recently created as part of the artist’s participation in the SPACE billboard commission at Mercer Union, Toronto.

Gallery 1 will house the artist’s series Corners of Your Sky, which stems from a Senneh rug originating from present day Western Iran which Kubba encountered during a 2022 artist residency in the Atacama Desert. She had previously researched and emulated rugs from this region using various methods to trace and retrace their designs, creating ever increasing distance between the original object and its drawn likeness. Corners of Your Sky spans drawings on latex, embroidery on found plastics, and sculptural works produced with a 3D printer pen in coloured and clear filament.

Sukaina Kubba’s recent experimentation in producing work with materials derived from various natural and synthetic processes (latex, rubber, reclaimed plastic and PLA filament) led to rug-like, rolled textile and installation objects. This in turn prompted Kubba to research Persian rugs which she had encountered through family and domestic encounters, fictional stories and collections, seeking to transmit narratives of the travel, trade and acquisition of rugs. Her work seeks to invoke the history of their origins, extraction, manufacture and packaging; and the deployment of their textures and visual properties.

Rugs – and textiles in general – more so than many artefacts, are intricately tied to a history of exchange and transport. It is in their nature to be rolled: they are nomadic units of architecture carried on the backs of horses, or in the bellies of shipping vessels, and unfurled to make familiar a home elsewhere. Kubba talks of the rugs that have followed her family and herself to numerous cities: Baghdad, London, Abu Dhabi, Montreal, Dubai, Glasgow and now Toronto. The Iraqi rugs in museum collections have followed a trajectory – from East to West – similar to that undertaken by the artist’s own family and the Iraqi diaspora.

A publication will accompany the exhibition, featuring newly commissioned texts by Montreal-based artist Swapnaa Tamhane and Glasgow-based writer Daisy Lafarge.

The artist will return to DCA Print Studio to produce a limited edition to accompany the exhibition.