What's On

This major exhibition from Sukaina Kubba marks the artist’s first solo exhibition in a UK institution. Kubba is a multidisciplinary artist whose work is strongly rooted in material and cultural research, story-telling, and drawing connections. Kubba works with industrial and packaging materials, and explores traveling 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.

The artist’s recent experimentation in producing work with materials derived from various petro-chemical processes (synthetic latex and rubber, PLA filament) led to rug-like, rolled textile/ 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, packaging and trade; 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.

Kubba’s exhibition will span both DCA gallery spaces and will bring together existing works with new commissions, including new works in print produced during a residency with DCA Print Studio in January 2024.

Opening Hours: Tue-Sun: 11am-6pm (7pm on Thurs).

Information published by Leisure and Culture Dundee.