'True Colors: Textiles: motions, colors, and identities' featuring Dana Awartani at MAXXI L'Aquila, Italy

26 May 2025

From 7 June – 17 November, MAXXI L'Aquila presents 'True Colors: Textiles: motions, colors, and identities' featuring Dana Awartani.

The exhibition draws inspiration from and gives a voice to various traditions and cultures, reflecting the widespread interest in textiles, not only as a medium of artistic expression but also as an integral part of daily life for individuals, peoples, and cultures, representing their most intimate and profound identities. True Colors: Textiles: motions, colors, and identities' explores textiles as a language for artistic expression and the constructing narratives, spaces, and relationships. The exhibition contains works from the MAXXI collection, in dialogue with loans and new productions by international artists. Textiles take over and transform the Museum’s spaces. Performative and participatory works, immersive and site-specific installations composed of garments, fibres, and fabrics establish connections with the social context.

Dana Awartani engages in critical and contemporary reinterpretations of the forms, techniques, concepts and spatial constructs that shape Middle Eastern culture. Steeped in a multitude of historical references, especially Islamic and Arab art-making traditions, Awartani’s practice straddles continuity and innovation, aesthetic experimentation and social relevance. Spanning painting, sculpture, performance and installation, Awartani’s commitment to historically situated and locally sourced materials lends a rare sensitivity to urgent political concerns of gender, healing, cultural destruction and sustainability.

Find out more via MAXXI L'Aquila.

Image: Dana Awartani, Let me mend your broken bones 21, 2024, Darning on medicinally dyed silk and paper, 8 pieces (27 cm x 36 cm each) © Dana Awartani, Courtesy Lisson Gallery