Care is not comfort.
Care is a crack.
A refusal to turn pain into beauty,
or fatigue into productivity.
To care is to stay inside the wound –
to inhabit the distance between bodies,
without closing it too soon.
To care means to unlearn the reflex of repair.
We are not nurses of harmony.
We are researchers of fragility.
We are the seamstresses of the invisible fabric –
the one that holds the world together but never appears in the frame.
Our Care is not therapeutic.
It is political and negative.
It resists the optimism of progress,
the false language of success,
the moral comfort of “inclusion”.
Our Care is slow, uncertain, and collective.
It is made of breathing, silence, trembling,
and the shared exhaustion that binds us.
In the Sanatorium for Seamstresses,
we do not heal –
we reverse the direction of compassion.
The ones who were always “helped”
will now become the helpers.
The ones who were observed
will now observe.
We declare the right to fragile solidarity.
To tired tenderness.
To imperfect gestures.
We believe that only through Negative Care –
Care that does not fix,
does not absorb,
does not pacify –
can we begin to imagine another kind of world:
a world where the act of touching by ivy is already an act of resistance.
SHIG, 2026
Shig was made in Bishkek, where Gluklya began long-term research in 2021 into the working and psychological conditions of garment workers. This research addresses the systemic exploitation of sewing workers in the city, who are underpaid, chronically overworked, and largely excluded from labour protections, shared spaces, and the possibility of collective organisation. Beyond physical exhaustion, Shig foregrounds the psychological effects of isolation, precarity, and the demand for constant productivity imposed by the neoliberal garment industry.
In the film, the garment industry unfolds as a metaphor for society at large — soaked in extractive, toxic capitalism. It calls for a slowing down of productivity and invites reflection on alternative rituals through which such slowing might become possible.
Alongside real sewing workers — some of whom chose to remain anonymous — Shig features the renowned Kyrgyz actress Gulmira Tursunbaeva, as well as artists and activists from the Bisca group. Together, they inhabit a fragile space between fiction and reality, where voices usually separated are allowed to speak, gather, and momentarily breathe together.
Portfolio of exhibition “The Shadow of Care”, 2026
Looking back at TWO DIARIES: GLUKLYA & MURAD
A conversation between Gluklya and Knut Birkholz
Living Archive
Two Diaries Yurt (2nd Edition) 2025
4 m in diameter x 1.65 m height
Wooden sticks, textiles, plastic tubes, conceptual pillows, the body of Shahmaran (soft sculpture), chair for two people with the book: Two Dairies: Gluklya and Murad
Criminal Fruit 2021
Field Wives 2023
Exhibition “Images of Power”, Textile Biennale, Museum Rijswijk, Netherlands. Curated by Diana Wind.
The war in Ukraine has again brought a centuries-old crime against women and also men to our attention. In the past century, stories about rape, abuse and terror only made the news afterwards, sometimes even years later, because the suffering that a war brings had to be dealt with in its entirety, perpetrators and victims had to find their place again. An example is the 70,000 ‘comfort women’ who were forced to work as sex slaves in army and navy brothels during the Japanese occupation of the former Dutch East Indies between 1942 and 1945.
To Those Who Have No Time to Play 2022-23
To those who have no time to play is structured around four stories drawn from the artist’s own experiences. Each narrative is represented by its own form of architecture and mode of reception. As someone looking at the exhibition, you are asked to perform different roles during your time there. You become a reader, a viewer, a listener, an emotional participant, an outsider caught in the midst of a protest, a collective presence in a chorus of sewing machines or any number of other roles you can define for yourself. There is a beauty in how the exhibition unfolds and how your attention is called to other people’s struggles that ask to become part of your own, if only for a little while.
from the curatorial text by Charles Esche “Who has no time to play?” (page 35)
Continue reading “To Those Who Have No Time to Play 2022-23”
No Future But Poems
31.10—30.11.24
Apparatus 22
Gluklya
Ivana Spinelli
made in collaboration by: GALLLERIAPIU and SKALA