Art Basel Qatar 2026

Axel Vervoordt Gallery is pleased to announce its participation in Art Basel Qatar 2026, a new international platform dedicated to contemporary art and cultural exchange in the Middle East.

The gallery’s presentation reflects its ongoing commitment to artistic practices that engage with history, material presence, and spiritual inquiry, fostering dialogue between diverse cultures and perspectives. Through its participation, Axel Vervoordt Gallery continues to contribute to a global discourse that bridges tradition and contemporaneity.

Axel Vervoordt Gallery is pleased to present Thread Routes: Chapter III by Kimsooja at Art Basel Qatar. 'Thread Routes' is Kimsooja’s first 16mm film series, after having spent more than three decades contextualizing and conceptualizing textiles as a canvas that supports a structural investigation of human life, nature and the world.

While contemporary art has long considered textiles as craft, Kimsooja has consistently sought to connect the nature of textiles to the performative, the sculptural/ architectural, the notion of tableau and questions of gender, aesthetics and culture.

Divided into six chapters, Thread Routes takes place in six different cultural zones around the world. Kimsooja considers her approach as a 'visual poem' and a 'visual anthropology' in juxtaposing and presenting structural similarities in performative elements of textile culture with the structures in nature, architecture, agriculture and gender relationships in different cultures. These non-descriptive and non-narrative documentary films were conceived after being inspired in Bruge, Belgium in 2002, by traditional lace making, and its performative elements and architectural structure.

The third chapter of the series (2012) was filmed in India, a return to the country where she performed and filmed for A Needle Woman (1999-2001), A Homeless Woman (2000), A Laundry Woman - Yamuna River (2000), and for the colourful visual and almost ethnographic tour that is Mumbai: A Laundry Field (2007).

Thread Routes: Chapter III features traditional dyeing, knitting, embroidery, block printing, wood engraving, and tattooing; the archaeological sites and the temporary dwellings belonging to nomadic communities in the state of Gujarat; as well as two landmarks in Indian architecture: the Queen’s Stepwell (Rani ki vav) and the Sun Temple, Modhera, near the city of Ahmedabad. The archaeological constructions from the 11th century (Chaulukya dynasty), seem to echo the patterns of fabrics through their ornaments and repeating stepwells, as if labour resonates.

With this film series Kimsooja demonstrates the hidden reality of the diverse forms of textile construction, and contextualizes the relationship between textile making and architecture practices along side the natural geographical forms. Similar and distinctive elements of visual phenomena are woven and merged together as equal visual and cultural vocabularies. They also illustrate the similarities and differences in this gender oriented activity in different performative weaving, spinning, and sewing cultures. By defining this link Kimsooja creates a dialogue that enriches the context of contemporary art and life.

The painstaking labor of textile making coupled with the necessities of shelter, farming, and human relations, shows how our life and humanity is rooted in yin and yang, and its negative and positive energy that was the origin of Kimsooja’s perception, and creation of the world.

Taking this pure visual experience as a statement on how the artist gazes at the world, this poetic visual archaeology becomes a retrospective of her practice in the past that continues today.

Kimsooja considers the ‘Thread Routes’ series as a parallel performance to the needlework she has done since the early 1980’s, and its evolution into the ‘A Needle Woman’ performance series since 1999. This series took places from around the world as an encyclopaedia of a needle and a thread. While ‘A Needle Woman’ investigates the dimensions of the needle, Kimsooja contextualizes contemporary art through her multi-disciplinary practice through eyes of a needle and thread that weave humanity, nature and cosmology consistently and evolutionary throughout her more than thirty year career. ‘Thread Routes’ traces the formal and psychological threads encompassing the textile structures to that of the body and the world, and human desire to culture.

About the artist:
Kimsooja (b.1957, Daegu, South Korea) is a multidisciplinary conceptual artist whose work spans installation, sculpture, performance, and film. Her practice engages deeply with themes of migration, memory, and materiality, pushing the boundaries of textile and painting through the performative gestures of folding, wrapping, and spatial intervention. Her work explores the tension between presence and absence, movement and stillness. surface and depth-transcending disciplinary boundaries.

Kimsooja studied in Seoul (1980-84) and Paris (1984-85). Her works have been exhibited in numerous solo shows at renowned international museums, including MoMA PS1 in New York(2001), Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid (2006), Musée d'Art Moderne Saint-Étienne and Miami Art Museum (both in 2012), Vancouver Art Gallery (2013), Guggenheim Museum Bilbao(2015), Centre Pompidou-Metz (2015,2022), MMCA Seoul (2010, 2016), CAC Málaga(2016), Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein (2017), Wanàs Konst Sculpture Park in Sweden (2020), Leeum Samsung Art Museum in Seoul (2021), Frederiksberg Museum in Copenhagen(2022),and Bourse de Commerce, Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Museum De Lakenhal in Leiden (all in 2024),and Oude Kerk in Amsterdam(2025).