17 June — 16 August 2026, Azerbaijan National Carpet Museum, Baku
Step 1: Open and Moisten, mixed media, 71 x 58 in / 180 x 145 cm
Step 3: Apply and Rinse, mixed media, 71 x 58 in / 180 x 145 cm
Step 4: Inhale and Squeeze, mixed media, 71 x 58 in / 180 x 145 cm
Step 5: Press and Prevent, mixed media, 71 x 58 in / 180 x 145 cm
Installation view
Untitled (the Hand)
Henna Aho, Elina Juopperi and Timur Amirkhan
Curator Konul Rafiyeva
Works above: Henna Aho / photos: Vesa Aaltonen, National Carpet Museum
Threads of Remembrance presents works by Elina Juopperi, Henna Aho and Timur Amirkhan inside the Azerbaijan National Carpet Museum. The exhibition treats textile not as craft, decoration or heritage display, but as a living system through which memory, labour, care and knowledge are carried, maintained and transformed across generations.
Rather than staging a simple dialogue between traditions, the project examines how textile continues to function as a medium of transmission under contemporary conditions. It asks what forms of knowledge survive when carried by gesture, repetition, repair and material density, and what happens to these forms when they enter a museum that has long operated as an archive of woven memory.
At the centre stands the proposition that memory exists before it becomes document, archive or official narrative. It persists in bodies, domestic routines, objects, patterns and repeated acts of maintenance. Textile is both the subject of the exhibition and its method: a way of holding together what remains unresolved.
The exhibition is structured around three operations: textile as archive, textile as embodied structure, and textile as media. Across these perspectives, Juopperi and Aho’s works demonstrate how contemporary textile practice can register friction between fragility and weight, between disappearance and persistence, between personal labour and collective inheritance.
Together, these elements propose curating itself as a textile practice: an act of weaving relationships between people, objects, memories, institutions and places without erasing the seams. Rather than preserving memory as something completed, Threads of Remembrance explores how memory continues to be carried, repaired, transmitted and re-woven in the present. – Konul Rafayeva
Thank you for the support
the Finnish Cultural Foundation
Konstföreningen i Åbo – Turun Taideyhdistys ry
hennaaho.com 