The 2010-2013 Prototype Period

Between 2010 and 2013, mostly outside Berlin, mostly traveling, I made a series of small textile and material-conceptual works. This is a Real Thread (2011). Look at Your Self (2011). Behind Lies Lies Truth (2012). Binary Symphony (2011). They were small. They used embroidery, found fabric, hand-stitching. Most were under a meter on the long edge. I thought of them at the time as experiments — work made in transit, work made when I didn't have a studio, work made by hand because there was nothing else to make work with.

I now think they were the prototype.

Everything that scaled up in Bali after 2017 was already there in the 2010-2013 work, in miniature: the embroidery as language, the hand-mark on dark surface, the named-credit collaboration with non-Western artisans (the Varanasi works in 2011 with a workshop of artisans was the first real test of distributed authorship in textile), the parallel operation of conceptual move and material practice in a single piece. This is a Real Thread is the early prototype of the methodology that produces the Multiverse series fifteen years later. The thread is real. The line is mine. The stitch is theirs. The work is the conversation between.

What happened between 2013 and 2017 was scale. AIR Ubud opened in 2015. The studio team formed. The 2017 textile paintings are not a new register — they are the same register at a scale the early work could not achieve alone. A Real Thread fits in a hotel room. Goldfish Guerilla Pancake needs a studio with a team. The operation is the same. Only the body and the room are larger.

This is worth saying because the textile practice is sometimes read as a departure from the conceptual practice. It is not a departure. It is a prototype that found its scale. The conceptual register stayed too — (SM)ALL Things Shall Pass (2018), I Dare You (2019), Burnout Syndrome (2015). Both registers continue. What changed in 2017 was that one register found the studio it had been waiting for.

— Ole Ukena, 2026