Between Text and Textile: Transmedial Gestures in Anni Albers’s Six Prayers

• In Event: Bodies in Translation

Abstract

Made of cotton, linen, bast, and silver thread, Anni Albers’s textile work Six Prayers (1966-67) was commissioned by the Jewish Museum in New York to memorialize the six million Jewish victims of the Nazi genocide. The work is composed of six panels that intimate prayer scrolls. Black and silver threads produce what Albers called a “scriptural” effect, while the size of the individual panels (74”x 20”) approximates that of a burial casket, delimiting a space that can hold a body. Drawing on Albers’s own writings on the craft of weaving and the “tactile sensibility” that it enables, this paper analyzes the way in which her textile work facilitates remembrance of the dead. Tracing what I describe as “transmedial gestures”—moments of contact between textual scripture and material texture—I show how Six Prayers implicates the viewer through visual rhythm and play of light and thereby facilitates a form of remembrance that exceeds representation through ephemeral tactile encounters.

Author

• Simone Stirner, Vanderbilt University