Weaving is treated as an art that mirrors life, guiding an exploration of the structures and geometries found in popular arts across continents and in the avant-garde movements of the 20th century.
The reflection becomes the centerpiece of a new Istanbul exhibition opening on Friday, featuring Teresa Lanceta, a Barcelona-born artist who now resides in Alicante. The show, presented by the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, offers a panoramic view of Lanceta’s practice to date.
“Teresa Lanceta. Knitting as open source” surveys five decades of the artist’s work, positioning textiles and technique at the heart of her practice and as a method of inquiry. During the exhibition opening, Lanceta stated, “Weaving functions as a clear code of break and repetition, through which information that is inherently complex and plural can be read, transformed, and passed along, creating an ongoing process before it becomes a fixed image.”
The show brings together more than 200 works created by Lanceta, drawn from a collaboration between MACBA and IVAM. The installation comprises tapestries, canvases, paintings, drawings, writings, and videos. Lanceta noted that an anthology was offered to her, but she was reluctant to retire and did not want the project to be reduced to a simple retrospective. Since 1972 there has been ongoing activity, including a solo presentation at Reina Sofía in 2000.
These two hundred pieces are arranged across five rooms, with the exhibition’s organizers, Nuria Enguita and Laura Valles, describing how the works poetically interrogate concepts of collectivity and authorship that are traditionally linked to individual authorship.
The exhibition moves through two main axes: distinct creative phases in Lanceta’s career, and the influence of textile work observed in the Moroccan Middle Atlas over thirty years, alongside Lanceta’s stays in Barcelona’s Raval district, where she lived between 1969 and 1985. Lanceta remarked that the Raval period represented a recent, beloved chapter, a time when the artist felt drawn to that neighborhood and spent two years dedicated to this project.
The five rooms form a guided journey featuring series such as Fabrics, Do Not Buy Watches, Spanish Tapestry of the 15th Century, Waiting for the Future, Las Cigarreras (2011-2022), Gallinero (2019), Pass of the Ebro (2013-2015), Work of Work (2020-2022), and Trades of Raval (2019-2022).
This latest series emerges from a collaboration between students and educators, including Teresa Lanceta, Nicolas Malevé, IES Miquel Tarradell, and MACBA’s Education Department. The project centers on a digital map that captures participants’ stories, experiences, resources, and passions, along with their families as part of the artistic process.
collaborative work
In this exhibition, Lanceta pushes collaborative formats by co-creating pieces with artists from Alicante such as Olga Diego and Pedro G. Romero, the police station Leire Vergara, the Collective Ditch, and filmmaker Virginia Garcia del Pino.
“I have always been drawn to collaboration, but this round feels more direct and decisive than ever,” Lanceta explained. “I am delighted by the variety of projects I have undertaken with each collaborator, and I made sure to credit them properly to avoid owning the works alone.”
Together with Olga Diego, Lanceta developed a kind of fantastical ceramic theater that emerged from her workshop in Mutxamel. She noted that while she explored many techniques, ceramics had never before been part of her practice. This approach underscores the artist’s willingness to experiment and to reframe traditional media within a contemporary framework.