Photo: Ivan Yakimov
“Tisser le Soleil” brings together Chuvash artist Aysha Demina around an ancestral gesture — weaving — reimagined as a language of memory, resistance, and ecology.
Inspired by a mythological tale, the exhibition explores cultural resilience, the role of women’s labor, and the transmission of knowledge in a world marked by erasure and exile.
EXHIBITION MANIFESTO
The exhibition highlights the quiet strength of women’s labor and resilience. In Chuvash tradition, women carried their presence like armor: coin-laden garments, heavy and resonant, announcing their arrival in sound before sight. That weight, once a burden, becomes here a declaration of endurance. Demina’s threads embrace imperfection: they invite touch, participation, and the intimacy of shared making. Weaving becomes an act of care, a labor that resists invisibility, draws strength from vulnerability, and reclaims domestic knowledge as a source of power.
Ecology is integral to Demina’s practice. The history of weaving mirrors the history of loss: once sacred and slow, it was consumed by industrialization, stripped of ritual, and transformed into a source of planetary waste. Against this tide of speed and excess, she reclaims the patience of the hand, working with discarded fabrics, family remnants, and recycled fibers. Her materials are threads that have already lived, transformed into forms that speak of endurance and renewal.
“Tisser le Soleil” leads into a space where myth and memory meet, where the past softly resonates in the present, and the future is held by threads that endure. This exhibition invites reflection on cultural resilience, women’s labor, and ecological
Once, the sky held three suns. They shone without rest, and the world lived in endless summer. Humans, unable to bear the heat, called for an archer to quiet the heavens. Two suns were struck down and fell into the water. The third, in fear, drifted away. Winter arrived, bringing shadow and regret. From that moment, the world understood loss, the weight of human choice,and the burden of collective responsibility.
The Chuvash tale is the thread from which Aysha Demina begins to weave. Her work follows the path between memory and material, tracing a lineage fractured by silence, exile, and the erasure of local culture. Weaving, first learned from her mother and later rediscovered through encounters with artisans, became more than a craft: it became an act of revival, a way to speak in a language nearly lost. Each knot carries a pulse of ancestral memory, each fiber a syllable of a story interrupted. Her tapestries are shelters for memory, bodies of labor, and vessels of resistance that retain the warmth of the hand.
Photo: Naran Tsebikov
