Curated by: Leila Timmins
Not Soft by Nature marks the first museum solo show in Canada by artist Sukaina Kubba. Building on previous research on the cultural production of textiles, the exhibition presents an expansive installation based on the history of lacemaking and its global trade. Oscillating between research and free-association, Kubba weaves together motifs, figures, flora and fauna from rugs and textiles from a family rug, a 17th century rug fragment, and multiple artefacts from the Permanent Collection of the Textile Museum of Canada. This anachronistic layering of various materials and time periods references earlier guild-based production of decorative domestic objects such as rugs, wallpapers, and fabrics, which would often borrow motifs from a wide array culturally specific designs and objects. Working in collaboration with MYB Textiles, the last remaining operational lace mill in Scotland, Kubba mirrors this approach, creating a painterly design influenced by various historical textile fragments and reproduced as large bands of lace that envelop the exhibition space. By including elements that evince the tools of their creation as well as various iterations and copies produced in different materials, the work reflects on lace as an object of cultural transmission as well as the histories of domestic, industrial, and colonial production that have shaped it.
Sukaina Kubba is an Iraqi-born artist whose work is rooted in material and cultural research, material experimentation, storytelling and drawing connections. Kubba has exhibited at Western Exhibitions, Chicago and Patel Brown, Montreal; in Toronto at Venus Festival, two seven two gallery, Patel Brown, Greater Toronto Art Triennial at MOCA, Mercer Union SPACE Billboard Commission, the plumb, The Next Contemporary, Art Gallery of Ontario and Aga Khan Museum; and in Scotland at Dundee Contemporary Arts, Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow Project Room, Glasgow International and Kendall Koppe. In 2026 Kubba will also exhibit at Carleton University Art Gallery and Oakville Galleries. Kubba has attended residencies at the International Studio and Curatorial Program, New York and La Wayaka Current, Chile. She is a sessional lecturer in Visual Studies at the University of Toronto, and was previously a curator and lecturer at The Glasgow School of Art.