British Textile Biennial announces 2025 programme

The Future Was Always There – From Sea Snails to Star Wars

This Autumn, British Textile Biennial (BTB) explores invention and innovation in textile production; through indigenous knowledge to space-age technology, from the earliest form of shelter, the tent, to space suits, and from plant-based dyes to the first polymers.

With artists and designers, BTB25 revisits the textile pioneers of 20th century Lancashire inspired by a bold vision of the future that revolutionised our lives, with companies such as Grenfell in Burnley creating innovative materials that clothed explorers in extreme environments and new, synthetic fabrics such as Terylene made in Accrington that modernised ordinary lives with easy care clothing. However, these developments pushed the planet and its resources to extremes, so any future advances must look at ways to reset it and learn from a distant past that is almost lost to us.

Antarctic Village-No Borders, Lucy + Jorge Orta / ADAGP Paris 2025, 2007, Photo – Thierry Bal

Programme Highlights

• Lucy & Jorge Orta – Majlis: House of Hair at Blackburn Cathedral Crypt
  A retrospective of Lucy & Jorge Orta’s work centred on a major new commission, exploring Bedouin vernacular and technology to reimagine the traditional House of Hair, with a speculative response to nomadic living in the extreme scenario of mass desertification.
• Dhaqan Collective – The Aqal (House of Weaving Songs) at Blackburn Museum
  An interactive sound installation built with Somali communities in a traditional nomadic structure embedded with generational song and storytelling.
• The festival finale remains under wraps, to be announced in July. This immersive multi-media event takes place on the Biennial’s last weekend and offers visitors a chance to experience and explore the genre-defying multi-disciplinary work of a globally acclaimed artist/designer whose beginnings in Burnley inspired him towards an endless path of exploration and innovation. This career-spanning retrospective will fittingly take place in the heart of the town where his ideas originated, against the dystopian backdrop of Burnley’s haunting Empire Theatre.
• Pioneers of the Material World at Towneley Hall, Burnley
  A celebration of Lancashire’s global impact on outdoor performance wear—from Everest expeditions to Star Wars costumes.
• Learning from the Land at The Whitaker
  An exhibition which reveals nature’s overlooked wisdom and humanity’s impact on it.
  Dhara Mehrotra presents Filamentous, an installation celebrating mycelium as vital
  ecological 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.
• The Synthetic Revolution at Haworth Gallery
  Curated by fashion historian and broadcaster Amber Butchart and artist Claire Wellesley-Smith, exploring the legacy of polyester invention and its cultural and environmental impacts in the birthplace of Terylene.
• Hannah Robson at The Harris, Preston
  A monumental new commission responding to the Rayon legacy of Courtaulds, tracing industrial evolution and social transformation.
• Three early career artists from Venture Arts, Manchester respond to the themes of BTB25: Sally Hirst presents a solo exhibition at Helmshore Mill that explores the histories of disability among mill workers. Sarah Lee presents a large-scale embroidery reflecting on the relationship between high-performance fabrics and their connections to science fiction. Emilia Hewitt undertakes a summer residency at the Whitaker, developing photography and printmaking work in response to the Learning from the Land theme.
• Jamie Holman – Netlon Futures at the Fuse Box, Blackburn
  A youth-led film project celebrating Blackburn’s 1960s invention of tensile mesh used in civil engineering.
• Christian Jeffery – Textile & Football Fusion at Turton Tower
  A newly commissioned football shirt celebrates Turton’s role in the industrial revolution and the birth of British football.
• Flax and football both sit at the heart of the textile history of Lancashire, as they do in Northern France. åbäke & Le Cercle du S226erpent bleu is exploring these strands with communities and museums here and in Roubaix, through a commission supported by the British Council.
• Margo Selby – Breathing Colour
  A large-scale textile work at Lancaster’s Ashton Memorial exploring colour, printing technology, and future manufacturing. An Art in Manufacturing co-commission with National Festival of Making.
• Crystal Bennes – When Computers Were Women at Queen Street Mill, Burnley                   Woven artworks connect Jacquard looms and the overlooked women of early computer science.
• Tim Smith – Weaving the Future
  A multimedia installation merging textile history and digital innovation through performance and photography.
• Ninon Ardisson in residence with Creative Spaces Burnley
  An exploration of how 20th-century textile innovation could have evolved through local ecologies and biological materials·
• Selected through an open call with In-Situ, Alexis Maxwell creates a sci-fi-inspired installation.