Historic masterpieces and bold contemporary works weave together centuries of textile storytelling to reveal tapestry’s role as a medium for social and political dialogue. Presented by mudac and the Fondation Toms Pauli, Times in Tapestry: Goshka Macuga x Grayson Perry x Mary Toms, reveals how woven images continue to resonate across centuries, inviting viewers to reconsider the world through shifting threads of meaning, by placing centuries-old narratives alongside modern reflections on consumer culture, power, and collective identity.
For the exhibition, Goshka Macuga – a Polish artist known for an interdisciplinary practice rooted in historical research and archival inquiry – presents a new commission created in dialogue with the Toms Collection: Ark of No, a vision of impending disaster situated between nuclear threat and rising seas. The work reflects her ongoing interest in tapestry’s political resonance and its capacity to carry urgent messages across time, reinforcing her position as a leading voice in contemporary textile-based art.
Macuga has been creating monumental tapestries since 2009 – complex visual maps, incorporating references to art, politics, and global events. By drawing on the long tradition of tapestry as a medium for political messaging, she challenges established forms of representation and often includes 3D effects that invite viewers to step into the work, emphasising their role as observers and participants in the unfolding stories. As such, Macuga’s tapestries build layered reflections on ideology, power, and the tensions that run through contemporary life.
For Of what is, that it is; of what is not, that it is not (2012), Macuga came up with the idea of connecting Kassel and Kabul, while also questioning both her artistic position and the capacity of art institutions to mediate broader social and political issues. In response, she brought together documentation of two events with research and symbolic imagery, juxtaposing these elements in postproduction to create two large tapestries. In Death of Marxism, Women of All Lands Unite (2013), the artist depicts Karl Marx’s grave overlaid with voyeuristic photographs of women taken by twentieth-century Czech artist Miroslav Tichý. The title reworks the well-known communist slogan engraved on Marx’s tombstone, replacing “workers of all lands unite” with “women of all lands unite,” transforming the call from one aimed at ending class struggle into a feminist demand for the end of sexist oppression. In From Gondwana to Endangered, Who is the Devil Now? (2020), she expands this approach through three-dimensional woven depth, addressing the ecological crisis through a scene of a burning forest populated by anthropomorphic figures.
Mary Toms’s contribution forms a key foundation of the exhibition. Her collection, one of the most important private tapestry collections of the twentieth century, was bequeathed to the State of Vaud and includes more than one hundred works from major European manufactories dating from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. The Toms Pauli Foundation is dedicated to researching, preserving, and showcasing its collections of ancient and modern textile art.
Although the Foundation does not yet have a permanent exhibition space, it continues to make these collections accessible through exhibitions in Switzerland and abroad, along with ongoing research and publication projects. Tapestries such as The History of Scipio Africanus and The Emperors Titus and Vespasian portray heroic episodes drawn from Roman history. On this occasion, two of these works will be presented to the public for the first time.
Also included in the exhibition is English artist Grayson Perry, who’s widely known for his sharp commentary on contemporary life, addressing themes such as identity, gender, class, sexuality, and religion. Working across ceramics, metalwork, printmaking, and tapestry, he uses traditional craft techniques to explore how personal experience intersects with broader cultural attitudes. In his tapestries, Perry draws on a medium historically linked to elite narratives and repurposes it to depict the everyday realities and social tensions of modern Britain.
One of his most acclaimed bodies of work is The Vanity of Small Differences (2012), a series of six large-scale tapestries inspired by William Hogarth’s 18th-century moral tale, A Rake’s Progress. These works trace the life of a fictional protagonist, Tim Rakewell, mapping his journey through Britain’s social classes with both empathy and critique. Drawing on Perry’s travels and interviews across English regions for his BAFTA-winning Channel 4 documentary All in the Best Possible Taste with Grayson Perry, the tapestries incorporate rich narratives about class, taste and aspiration, blending hyper-local detail with broader socio-cultural insight.
What ultimately distinguishes Times in Tapestry is not an argument about revival, but a strategy of confrontation. By placing works from the Mary Toms Collection alongside contemporary perspectives of Goshka Macuga and Grayson Perry, the exhibition allows historical authority and present-day critique to unsettle one another. Mythic heroes, ideological monuments, domestic scenes and speculative futures coexist without hierarchy, revealing how images—once fixed in their moment—acquire new meanings when displaced in time. In this context, tapestry becomes less a subject in itself than a site of negotiation, where inherited narratives are neither preserved intact nor rejected, but actively re-read.
Times in Tapestry
November 7, 2025 – March 8, 2026
mudac, Lausanne, Switzerland
