Group of ancient Greek perfume bottles

610 - 550 BCE

Trans activist Jamison Green's passport photos before and after HRT. Left he's age 32 (1980) Right age 41 (1989) after being on testosterone for one year (x)

These original student IDs from the Bauhaus Dessau school belonged to young designers, artists, and architects who helped shape modernity.

Small documents. Big stories.

Explore more: https://www.bauhaus-experience.com/masterpiece-tour/.

With or without inscriptions, textiles convey all kinds of 'texts': allegiances are expressed, promises are made (as in today's bank notes, whose value is purely conceptual), memories are preserved, new ideas are proposed. Records were kept in quipu (khipu) a method of knotting string used by the Incas and other ancient Andean cultures to keep accounts and communicate information, the oldest of which is some 4,600 years old. Many anthropological and ethnographical studies of textiles aim at teaching us how to read these cloth languages anew. The 'plot' is provided by the socially meaningful elements; the 'syntax' is the construction, often only revealed by the application of archaeological and conservation analyses. Equally, the most creative textiles of today exploit a vocabulary of fibres, dyes and techniques. Textiles can be prose or poetry, instructive or the most demanding of texts. The ways in which they are used - and reused - add more layers of meaning, all significant indicators of sensitivities that can be traced back to the Stone Age."

Yakov Khomich

From the series "Girl in the blue dress", 2024