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Jakkai Siributr’s IDP Story Cloth (2016) at Flowers Gallery.

Fresh off the heels of the Gwangju Biennale, where it was last shown at the end of 2024, Jakkai Siributr’s IDP Story Cloth (2016) has arrived at London’s Flowers Gallery.

Part of an immersive solo show that includes three other large-scale textile works, the colossal embroidery is the clear wow-piece. The cloth is striking: beautiful, horrible, and exquisitely executed, gut-wrenching scenes are embroidered onto thick, starched fabric. A bright assortment of almost neon-rich colours and delicate stitching seem to celebrate the scope of the medium on a grand scale.

Four lofty panels hang from the ceiling in a rectangular formation, disguising any apparent beginning or end, allowing the viewer to be swept into the work from any access point.

Like a whirlpool, the narrative swiftly erupts as unmistakable depictions of violence, displacement, and migration unfurl, escalate, and spin out. One gets the sense that not only is everything happening at once, but the series of events is spiralling cyclically — repeating itself over and over again.

Drawing inspiration from traditional Hmong story cloths, the piece resembles politically charged textiles created in Thai refugee camps, mostly by Hmong women after fleeing with their families from Laos after the Secret War in 1975. The cloths were often sold to tourists as a means of livelihood, but were also important historical documents passed down through generations. Dynamic and energetic, over a decade of trauma is conveyed through symbolic reconstruction. 

While these tapestries are often blue, grey, or generally comprise a dark-coloured background colour (which apparently appealed to Western tastes of the time), Siributr’s cloth is creamy ivory, and several times larger than average. Usually ranging from 40 cm to one metre in length, each of his panels stretch over three metres tall. This sanitised, amplified, and outright whitecubified iteration of a traditional story cloth epitomises a kind of artification of ancient craft: both adapting itself to contemporary tastes as well as ritualising the story cloth as a fraught cultural commodity.

In fact, it is multiple cloths – created by multiple hands. Embroidered by a team of assistants; one from Myanmar and two from Thailand, the manual technique in each panel’s stitching varies accordingly like the voices in a conversation telling the same story but from different perspectives. First the artist draws outlines of the scene onto the fabric. Once needlework is introduced, he makes sure not to interfere with the unique embroidery approach of each practitioner — almost as if to not interrupt someone while they are speaking. 

The way each assistant executes an image may be tied to regional style, individual experiences, or such subjective subtleties as the intonation patterns of a sentence. Exhibited as one piece, the plurality of its creation reflects the paradox inherent to the collective trauma it depicts. 

Differentiation within large bodies of people with shared experiences is felt both on a firsthand and a group basis. In this way, while the cloth is impressive to behold as an entity, it is the act of coming up close to it and zeroing in on individual images that reveals its power. 

The power here comes from decolonising storytelling in the most fundamental way: by removing the words. “For many children who have experienced trauma, it is easier to share their stories through visual elements than words,” the artist explains. Embracing non-verbal or conventionally linguistic methods of oral history makes space for new dialogues — which is one of the most powerful mechanisms of textile art and its capacity to be politically subversive.

Still done by hand — but not his — the works also engage in questions of distributed labour in textile art production, manual skills, and who preserves them. Not only do the assistants make well above the local minimum wage, but they learned stories from one another’s backgrounds that otherwise may have gone unheard due to limited educational opportunities.

“We are so near, yet we know nothing about each other,” Siributr adds.

IDP Story Cloth is on view through 8th February at Flowers Gallery Cork Street in Mayfair, London and runs concurrent with There’s No Place at The Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester. The first UK exhibition of Siributr’s work, the exhibition surveys his practice and features a transformation of one of The Whitworth’s core collection galleries into the latest iteration of the artist’s long-term project and includes a series of embroidery workshops. Exploring ideas of home and belonging, the project creates an ongoing dialogue between the artist, the community of Koung Jor Shan Refugee Camp, and viewers around the world.

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