BRITISH TEXTILE BIENNIAL 2025

Date

2 Oct 2025 – 23 Nov 2025

Tickets

Free Entry
 
 
 
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THE FUTURE WAS ALWAYS THERE – from sea snails to Star Wars

Taking over hidden spaces, historic sites, and art galleries across Lancashire every other October, the British Textile Biennial (BTB) commissions and presents work by hundreds of artists, designers, and curators, inspired by the context and legacy of the textile industry in East Lancashire and its global impact.

This Autumn, BTB25 explores invention and innovation in textile production, through indigenous knowledge to space-age technology.

The Whitaker hosts a number of installations which reveals nature’s overlooked wisdom and humanity’s impact on it.

For more details see www.britishtextilebiennial

Artist Bio

Dhara Mehrotra presents Filamentous, an installation celebrating mycelium as vitalecological networks and sustainable material. 

Melanie Smith and Patricio Villarreal present a film with a Mixtec community depicting the ancestral, sustainable dye harvesting from the plicopurpura pansa sea snail. Three Mexican heritage artists explore colonial exploitation of land, labour, and body through cochineal dye.

Porfirio Gutiérrez reinvents traditional Zapotec weaving and cochineal dyeing to reflect on identity and migration.

Tania Candiani has previously represented Mexico at the Venice Biennale. She investigates cochineal’s journey from Indigenous pigment to colonial commodity and its historical resonance.

Sarah Rosalena blends Wixárika weaving with digital tools, using cochineal and indigo to explore Indigenous cosmologies and nonlinear time.