“Softwear,” a new exhibition in London will examine the links between textiles, code and the often-overlooked labour of women in the history of computing. Curated by Kira Wainstein, a statement says it will run from September 18 to October 17, 2026, at No Show Space in east London.
Organised by apexart, the exhibition will feature work by Crystal Bennes, daniela brill estrada and Monica C. LoCascio, Charlotte Johannesson, Steph Linn and Shannon Swinburn. It will open with a reception from 6:30pm to 8:30pm on September 17.
“Softwear” takes its starting point from the Jacquard loom, which used punched cards in 1804 to programme complex patterns into woven fabric. The system later informed the development of early computers by encoding data and instructions in a form that machines could read.
The exhibition also considers the women who worked as “human computers,” carrying out mathematical calculations by hand for fields including aeronautics and astronomy. It presents textiles and other works as a way of revisiting the manual, precise and gendered labour behind both weaving and computation.
Featured works include Bennes’s “When Computers Were Women” (2021), which transforms computer punch cards from a 1970s CERN experiment into woven wall hangings. Charlotte Johannesson’s “Guardian?” (1984) was created after the artist exchanged her loom for a computer, while Shannon Swinburn’s “IBM 1401” (2025) reconstructs the hand-threaded memory of an early computer.
Other works include “Phantom Fields” (2026) by daniela brill estrada and Monica C. LoCascio, which embosses historic lace drafts alongside fragments of physics and poetry onto copper, and Steph Linn’s “History Keeps Me Awake at Night” (2024), based on an untraceable digital image reproduced through hand-punched knitting cards.
•Featured image: Crystal Bennes, “When Computers Were Women”(2021) /apexart