Syntax of a Thread celebrates the fifth edition of Art Dialogues magazine, dedicated to textiles and produced in partnership with Mama Projects. The exhibition examines the relationship between textiles, the body, memory, and storytelling through works by Ophelia Arc, Cassandra Mayela Allen, Kevork Mourad, Lauren A. Pirie, Zé Tepedino, Mia Weiner, and Sarah Zapata.

Textiles are integral to our lives from birth, connecting us to different times and places through material culture. Historically, they have been closely associated with the body and daily life, shaping our environments with familiar objects and architecture. Building on this foundational relationship, the exhibition considers how textiles reflect the human condition across cultures and evoke intimacy, care, and sensory experiences.

Mia Weiner’s work centers on human relationships and their emotional resonance. Combining digital imagery and hand-weaving, her medium- to large-scale tapestries, often in single, vivid colors, bring bodies into connection. Interested in the power of softness and how it can be a form of resistance, Weiner examines how we perceive and represent identity, intimacy, and gender. In soft warm (2025), for example, interlaced bodies evoke a sense of entanglement, emphasizing inseparability. We can only identify legs, hands,
and arms, while a central hand conveys care through a gentle, caressing gesture.

Ophelia Arc’s works also explore the power of softness, drawing on psychoanalysis, feminist research, memory, and personal experience. Using flesh-like colors such as pinks, reds, whites, and oranges, her two installations address complex themes including home, birth, and pain. exhaustion replacement needed (2025) evokes a sense of connection and dependence, reminiscent of an umbilical cord or nursing breasts. wo(und)mb (2026), a large-scale crochet sculpture attached to a metal bed frame, symbolizes both “womb” and “wound,” suggesting an association between body and home, both molded by trauma. The works further reference Arc’s ongoing engagement with crochet—a practice she has pursued since her teenage years. For Arc, crochet is not only ingrained in her memory but, as she states, “a form of time keeping, it’s proof that I exist,” illustrating the intimate connection between her life and art.

Continuing the exhibition’s thematic thread of bodies and their environments, Lauren A. Pirie investigates living systems from ecological perspectives, focusing on life cycles and decomposition in her sculptures, paintings, and works on paper. Pirie’s engagement with plant dyes, upcycled textiles, images of flora and bodily forms highlights her interest in the interdependence of humans and other living beings. By treating textiles as skin, she draws a parallel between the vulnerability of human bodies and the delicate balance of ecosystems, emphasizing our ongoing interaction with and impact on the environments we inhabit. In The Naming of the World…Cannot Be an Act of Arrogance (2026), Pirie’s layering of painted and sculpted bodily forms within a landscape inspired by Brooklyn flora underscores her investigation of interconnectedness. She also explores the diptych format, pairing one work with blooming plants and warmer colors and the other with a more abstract, watery space with colder tones, reinforcing the notion of decomposition and renewal.

The exhibition also examines textiles as carriers of personal and collective histories, intertwining memory, identity, heritage, labor, and politics. Communicating stories through visual compositions and labor-intensive techniques—such as weaving, crocheting, and stitching—textile practices serve as tools for narrative, resistance, and cultural continuity within contemporary art and visual culture.

Sarah Zapata’s colorful, vibrant compositions with a variety of textures create a dialogue with architecture. Addressing themes such as textiles’ connection to the body, identity, feminism, and heritage, her works draw inspiration from her mixed ancestry, research into different textile traditions, nature, and life experiences. The artist combines contemporary and ancestral techniques, often with an abstract effect, in installations that occupy spaces denied to women who came before her. Beneath the Breath of the Sun (2024), originally created following a residency in Arizona, evokes the state’s landscape in yellows, oranges, and browns, bringing the desert and intense sunny days to an immersive experience.

This dynamic connection to place and identity also appears in the works of Zé Tepedino. In Ana 39 (2025), Tepedino brings Rio de Janeiro’s urban landscape into the gallery by sewing together beach umbrella canvas, beach chair nylon, and rope, transforming found materials into poetic compositions. These elements represent the carioca spirit and reflect local ways of living. Tepedino examines how people relate to the city through objects and their geometric rearrangements, considering the memories these materials hold and offering new perspectives on their meaning.

Building on these personal, social, and spatial narratives, the exhibition moves beyond traditional definitions and binaries that have long shaped textile practices in art history. It presents textiles as an interdisciplinary practice that has significantly influenced contemporary art, including drawing, painting, sculpture, and installation.

Kevork Mourad combines printmaking techniques such as monotypes with drawing, painting, and cut-outs to create sculptures, installations, and works on paper that unite people and architecture from the past, promoting cultural exchange and diversity. He is interested in the narrative potential of these compositions and how they connect viewers to their own memories and stories. Drawing on his Armenian and Syrian heritage, Mourad often bases his work on historical periods or specific tales, reflecting on the present by looking to the past. In the circular installation at the exhibition, The Wounded Partridge (2026), he presents a multi-layered panorama of cutout drawings on paper. The work, scaled to the human body, offers a dynamic narrative and a sense of time passing by, combining historical moments with architectural forms.

Cassandra Mayela Allen explores diaspora experiences, drawing on her Venezuelan background and the migration journeys of others through woven abstract structures and figure quilts with photographic prints. She challenges fixed identities by referencing Homi Bhabha’s concept of the “third space,” where new identities emerge from shared experiences, languages, and traditions. Textiles play a key role in creating this space, evoking bodily memories and a sense of belonging. In her sculptures and installations, Mayela Allen cuts fabric into strips and threads them together to form new worlds, infused with liveliness, labor, and care, such as in Tírenlos pa’bajo, que son un peligro arriba (2025). In a new series, she composes drawings inspired by architectural elements that convey a sense of movement, evoking memories in transit and transformation.

At a time when identity, cultural heritage, care, and labor are urgent issues, textile practices offer crucial perspectives on creative processes and our ways of living. Syntax of a Thread celebrates textiles and articulates contemporary issues through the artists’ practices, seeking to shape reflections on contemporary art and politics of belonging.


1. Ophelia Arc, “On salvation, from work and labor to the “myth” of the unicorn,” Art Dialogues, May 2026, https://art-dialogues.com/ophelia-arc/

2. Cassandra Mayela Allen, “Cassandra Mayela Allen,” Art Dialogues, May 2026, https://art-dialogues.com/cassandra-mayela-allen/

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