Stacey de Voe: Under the Needle’s Eye
Sven and Ellida Hjort’s Grant Exhibition

Feb 24–March 31
Opening: Feb 23, 18.00–21.00
Artist talk and double publication release med Paletten: 15 mars, kl 18:30–21

Production chains forming raw material into thread, thread into textile and textile into product. A worker losing an eye at a machine. Extended working hours while wages remained stagnant. A carding machine operator is fired after borrowing the wrong coat during a smoke break. Payrolls presenting some thirty labor positions.

How can we stage a story? Can we speculate without lying? Fantasize beyond nostalgia? Who can inhabit these fantasies?

A lost textile industry forms the departing point of Stacey de Voe’s artistic inquiry and exhibition Under the Needle’s Eye. Kürzel’s Spinning Mill, where Skånes konstförening’s premises are located, was a world dressed in duvetyne, tartan textiles and cleaning rags. Here worked spinners, dyers and weavers; union representatives and managers. All under one roof, closed off to the city by a heavy iron gate, richly ornamented with twisting foliage and sharp flowers.

Through a staging of video, print and textile, de Voe moves through a neglected part of Malmö’s past, provoking reflections between the local industrial history and contemporary international labor politics. The memory of the workplace is portrayed as an intricate supervisor and architectural structure through artworks where tartan and duvetyne give voice to the building and body to the history.

The exhibition is accompanied by a publication with texts by Hanan Benammar, Makda Emabie, Helle Lindskog, Lisa Tracy Michalik, Ina Nian, Emil Sandström, Kuba Szreder och Kathi Weeks designed by Anders Stockman (VarvVarv).

Stacey de Voe (b. 1988) lives and works in Malmö. She is the 2023 recipient of the Sven and Ellida Hjort Exhibition Grant, a grant awarded annually by Skånes konstförening to an emerging artist in Skåne. Her artistic practice uses site specificity and the archive to articulate broader issues of historicity, labor politics, collective memory and friendship. The works link archival material, personal narratives and fiction to evoke a contemporary awareness of our time. In her process, which is often relational, she uses audiovisual and performative methods to stage speculative narratives. She received her MFA from Malmö Art Academy in 2023.

Curator Janneke Schoene and Albin Hillervik