The Legend of The Looms – Ali Al-Jamri, presented in partnership with the British Arab Centre at Blackburn Museum & Art Gallery from February – 8 March 2025.

Commissioned by the Arab British Centre as part of As We Are, Might Have Been, and Could Be, in partnership with British Textile Biennial.

Working in film for the first time, Ali Al-Jamri’s commission titled The Legend of The Looms is an installation of poetry, film and textiles exploring shared revolutionary histories through handloom weaving. It features a filmed narrative debate poem between two ghostly handloom weavers: one from the North West, where weavers were critical in working class movements before, during and after the Peterloo Massacre of 1819; the other from Bahrain, where weaving communities played vital roles in reform movements. In this dramatised performance, the ghostly weavers spar over whose life was harder, whose struggles were fiercer, whose folk poetry better, until they find common ground and friendship.

Filmed with the weavers of Al-Jamri’s own family in Bahrain, and in Rossendale Valley, at a historic weaver’s cottage in Rawtenstall, the piece delicately dances between place, fact and folklore, creating a new myth that explores how people of the diaspora can relate to an unlikely new landscape through the interconnectivity of oppressions, craft, and mortality. The film is exhibited in installation format with the textiles featured in the film, for which Al-Jamri is working with renowned Manchester-based textile artist Ibukun Baldwin.

The film installation will be exhibited at Blackburn Museum, with the British Textile Biennial, from 1 February – 8 March. This work is supported by Arts Council England and The Freelands Foundation.

Project Credits:
Writer and producer: Ali Al-Jamri
Film director and producer: Ricardo Vilela
Curator: Jessica El Mal
Additional footage: Mohammed Jassim
Textile creation: Ibukun Baldwin

You can see more of Ali’s work on this link: https://alialjamri.com/