KNOT KNOW: Introduction

For Pickle Bar’s Summer Program, KNOT KNOW explores craft’s potential for building solidarity and queering beliefs across Central Asia and China. Each month, a specific work will be presented at Pickle Bar – a paper cut-out, an ikat, or Muslim Chinese calligraphy – as a gnostic thumbnail, a point of departure for lectures, screenings, podcasts – online as well as in real brine. Crafts offer a tonic to the many jinns of contemporary society: be they cults of personality, secular rage, or ecstatic acceleration. Crafts tend to invest in continuity as a means of re-thinking notions of progress. Innovation is decoupled from individualism, so as to avoid the incessant ruptures, the breaks with the past, the patricides, matricides, and transicides of our modern era.