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...
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Image Credits:
Lead: Jounghye Yoo, Gilded Veil - A Mysterious Curtain Lightly Draped in Gold, 2025. Installation view in Hyundai Translocal Series: Entangled and Woven, the Whitworth. Photo by Michael Pollard.
All further images as credited in captions.