Manchester has always been a city that thinks in cloth. So when the Whitworth decided to bring eight contemporary textile artists from Korea and India into its galleries, alongside pieces pulled from its own historic collection, the choice of city was never incidental. This is where industrial textile history sits in the walls. Hyundai Translocal Series: Entangled and Woven is open now, running until 3 January 2027, and it asks a pointed question: what happens when craft traditions stop being treated as finished heritage and start being treated as something still moving?
Co-organised with the Cheongju Craft Biennale 2025 and the National Crafts Museum & Hastkala Academy, and backed by Hyundai Motor's new decade-long Translocal Series initiative, the exhibition has already travelled from Cheongju to New Delhi before arriving in the UK. Each stop has added something. By the time it reaches Manchester, the work carries three cities' worth of conversation inside it.
PÉRO, Entangled Memories, Interwoven Stories, and Somi Ko, People of One, Continuum and Moment, Hyundai Translocal Series: Entangled and Woven installation (2026) the Whitworth, The University of Manchester. Photo by Michael Pollard.
Take Somi Ko, who hand-spins hanji, traditional Korean mulberry paper, into thread as a daily practice. In People of One, Continuum and People of One, Moment, that hanji thread meets Gujarati textile techniques and khadi, the hand-spun cotton so tied to Indian ideas of self-sufficiency. Two distinct fibre histories, worked into a single structure.
Jounghye Yoo builds a different kind of hybrid. Her installation Gilded Veil takes the archways of Varanasi's Vishwanath Temple as its architecture, then renders them through Korean silk embroidery layered with Indian Ajrakh block printing, so light falls through the piece the way it might through a real threshold.
Young In Hong, Sacred Empires and White Cranes in Snowfall Hyundai Translocal Series: Entangled and Woven installation (2026) the Whitworth, The University of Manchester. Photo by Michael Pollard.
Some of the collaborations run deeper than material choice. Youngin Hong has spent time working directly with the women artisans of the Kala Raksha collective in Kutch, and her resulting pieces, including Sacred Empires, imagine worlds where women's labour, animals and environment share equal standing. It draws, quite literally, from a history of undervalued hands.
Sumakshi Singh, Spanning the Void, Hyundai Translocal Series: Entangled and Woven installation (2026) the Whitworth, The University of Manchester. Photo by Michael Pollard.
Elsewhere, Kaimurai works indigo alongside sound and ritual, treating the dye vat as something closer to devotional practice than production process. Boito, the Odisha-based collective, pulls painting, weaving, embroidery and metalwork into single composite objects drawn from regional myth. PÉRO's Aneeth Arora brings fifteen years of collaboration with artisans into garments where patchwork and embroidery carry memory and place. And Sumakshi Singh, representing India at the 2026 Venice Biennale, contributes a thread bridge, dissolving and fragile, linking architectural forms from Korea, India and the UK.
Kaimurai, “The answers to all my prayers are in the questions I never asked”, Hyundai Translocal Series: Entangled and Woven installation (2026) the Whitworth, The University of Manchester. Photo by Michael Pollard.
Craft labour and global supply chains are under real pressure right now, and this exhibition asks who gets to be seen as its author. The Whitworth's director, Sook-Kyung Lee, describes the show as shaped by movement, of people, ideas, skills and materials. In Manchester, that movement meets the city's own cloth history, and the conversation keeps unfolding.
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Further Information:
Hyundai Translocal Series: Entangled and Woven is open now, running until 3 January 2027 at the Whitworth Gallery, Manchester.
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Image Credits:
Lead: Jounghye Yoo, Gilded Veil, Hyundai Translocal Series: Entangled and Woven installation (2026) the Whitworth, The University of Manchester. Photo by Michael Pollard.
All further images as credited in captions.