Hana Miletić: Soft Services

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On the left, two cylindrical orange net-like sculptures are displayed. One is much smaller than the other; the smaller one incorporates an inner green component. On the far right, a large brown tapestry hangs from the ceiling. Blue fiber strips grid the piece with some of the strips dangling onto the floor. In the background on the right, a small, yellow caution tape fiber sculpture is bunched up dangling off the wall and onto the floor.

Exhibition view: Hana Miletić: Soft Services, MIT List Visual Arts Center, 2024. Photo: Dario Lasagni

Location
Reference Gallery
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Hana Miletić
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In Spring 2024, the List Visual Arts Center presents the first US solo exhibition of Hana Miletić.

Since 2015, the Zagreb-born artist has worked almost exclusively with hand-produced textiles across several ongoing series. The shaggy polychrome tufts of the collectively felted wool pieces in Felt Workshops, for example, are the product of a community-oriented social practice in which the artist collaborates with other female-identifying first-generation immigrants to Brussels (Miletić’s home since the early 1990s).

The artist’s Materials series—delicate, brightly colored weavings that are conceived in relation to street photography—are hand woven on a 1970s loom. Extending from her formal training as a photographer, their idiosyncratic shapes and color-schemes are based on Miletić’s snapshots of temporary repairs to buildings and objects in urban public spaces. Though never exhibited, her photographs of responsive, ad-hoc constructions (pink tape sutures on a car’s door, or teal netting swaddling a tree trunk) become templates for seemingly abstract textile pieces. Materials’ fidelity to the source photography also provides a logic for the scattershot heights the works hang at when presented in the gallery. The artist’s abiding interest in these repairs stems from her belief that they trace “developments affecting the cities’ communities,” and stand as “subjective gestures of care.” Her meticulous and time-consuming use of hand work to document the ephemeral repairs reproduces this ethos of care and provides a slowness and material intimacy that Miletić found lacking in the medium of photography. Across her various series, Miletić also calls attention to the gendered associations of textile craft, subtly relating forms of historically undervalued labor, like the “women’s work” of weaving, to other narratives of social and economic struggle and the larger political forces that give shape to them. 

Miletić’s exhibition is organized by Selby Nimrod, Assistant Curator.

Hana Miletić (b. 1982, Zagreb, Croatia); lives and works in Brussels. She has held recent solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Mainz, Germany (2023); Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Rijeka; MUDAM Luxembourg (2022); Bergen Kunsthall, Norway (2021); and WIELS, Brussels (2018). Her work was included in Dhaka Art Summit, Dhaka (2023); Manifesta 14, Prishtina (2022); and the 13th Sharjah Biennial (2017) and has been exhibited in group survey exhibitions at institutions including Antenna Space, Shanghai; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh; Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb; among many others. In 2021 Miletić was awarded the Baloise Art Prize.

Sponsors

General operating support is provided by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; the Council for the Arts at MIT; Philip S. Khoury, Vice Provost at MIT; the MIT School of Architecture + Planning; the Mass Cultural Council; and many generous individual donors. This exhibition is also supported by generous donors to the 2023 McDermott Award Gala, hosted by the Council for the Arts at MIT. The Advisory Committee Members of the List Visual Arts Center are gratefully acknowledged.

Images

On the left, a large brown rectangular tapestry with blue gridded lines hangs from the ceiling. The tape-like lines divide the tapestry into three rows and four colors. On the right, three smaller fiber artworks are displayed. Two are black, white, and gray. The third piece is a red X form crossing an off-white square affixed to the wall.
On the left, an orange net-like fiber sculpture hangs off the wall encasing a smaller, green fiber cylindrical piece. Suspended from the ceiling in the center of the image, another orange net cylinder is suspended from the ceiling. Several smaller fiber sculptures are affixed to the wall in the background. In the right of the frame, a large brown tapestry peeks into the frame.
Two tapestries, similar in scale and color, hang side by side. Each depicts abstracted forms that are repeated in a grid with slight variations, as if some rows were stretched. They are brown, beige, yellow, and gold.
A white gallery with two artworks on display. On the left, a woven orange net-like sculpture hangs on the wall encasing a smaller, green fiber sculpture. On the right, a similar sculpture (though taller and without the inner green form) is suspended from the ceiling.
Three fiber artworks hang on a wall at different heights. At upper left, a white square is crossed with a red X. In the middle, lower to the ground, a gray woven textile strip is joined with an off-white textile rectangle with a black arrow design that points to the upper right. On the right, a bundle of gray and white textile strips in various sizes is bound by black textile pieces.
A large rectangular brown tapestry hangs from the ceiling of a gallery. Irregular strips of tape-like blue textile create a grid on top of the brown, with some of the blue strips dangling on the floor. In the background on the left, a tiny green fiber artwork is affixed to the wall close to the floor.
Three small fiber artworks hang at various heights on a white wall. A small green woven square with the center peeled back hangs low to the ground on the left. Two works hang in the upper right corner: one is a white and ribbon-like; the other is an overlapping bundle of pink, white, and blue textile.
In the foreground on the left, a large brown tapestry is suspended from the ceiling. Blue strips of textile grid the tapestry, with some of the tape-like strips dangling onto the floor. On the right, a smaller gold-beige tapestry hangs on the wall. On the back wall, three smaller fiber artworks hang on the wall, including a small off-white square with a red X hung next to the entrance to the space. A blurred silhouette of a person stands in the entryway.
On the left, two cylindrical orange net-like sculptures are displayed. One is much smaller than the other; the smaller one incorporates an inner green component. On the far right, a large brown tapestry hangs from the ceiling. Blue fiber strips grid the piece with some of the strips dangling onto the floor. In the background on the right, a small, yellow caution tape fiber sculpture is bunched up dangling off the wall and onto the floor.
The entryway to a gallery is shown from the viewpoint of someone inside. To its left, an off-white fiber square with a red X across the piece hangs on the wall. To its right, a large, brown and beige tapestry with fringe edges hangs on the wall. In the back of the entrance way, a small two-part fiber artwork hangs on the wall.
A white gallery space with cement floor displaying several artworks scattered throughout the space. On the left side, two orange net-like fiber sculptures hang, one off the wall and the other from the ceiling. On the right, a large, brown, rectangular tapestry with blue gridded lines hangs from the ceiling. Smaller artworks are displayed in the background and on the right wall.
A small green square shaped weaving hangs on the wall close to the floor. A hole in its center, shaped approximately like a square with a missing corner, reveals the white wall behind the piece.
A close-up view of a woven netlike structure of a hanging textile artwork. The artwork forms a kind of dense cylinder, with several overlapping layers of material. On the left of the image, another orange netlike artwork hangs on the wall encasing a smaller green fiber cylinder inside of it.
In the foreground on the left, a large brown rectangular tapestry hangs suspended from the ceiling. Blue fiber strips border brown panels with the strips dangling onto the floor. In the background, two large brown and beige tapestries hang on the wall. On the right, two orange netlike sculptures are on display with one hanging off the wall and one suspended from the ceiling.
A white gallery space with a reflective cement floor. On the right, two netlike orange sculptures are on display with one hanging off the wall and one suspended from the ceiling. In the back, two large, brown and beige tapestries with fringe edges and a repetitive pattern hang on the wall. On the left, an off-white fiber square with a red X across the piece hangs on the wall next to the entrance to the gallery.
A yellow woven, caution tape fiber artwork is bunched up in a bow-like form dangling off the white wall onto the cement floor.
A corner, wrap-around, wall of the entrance to a gallery space. On the top of the wall in the foreground, a painting depicting colorful Egyptian figures on a blue background wraps around the corner. In the background, two abstract, string-like, fiber artworks are on display stacked on top of each other. The topmost piece is a pink-like color, the below piece is a blue-green color.

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Hana Miletić: Soft Services

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