Textiles might seem the benign accompaniments to everyday life but every thread carries a complex history, tangled up with issues around labour, gender, value, and legacies of oppression, extraction and trade. The Barbican’s new show Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art attempts to unfurl them, putting the focus on artists from the 1960s to today who have harnessed the subversive potential of textiles to raise questions about power structures and how they are upheld.

If anyone was in doubt about the potency of the medium, this is the show to see. Don’t miss Cecilia Vicuña’s spatial installation ‘Quipu Austral’, which draws on the history of textiles as ancient systems of communication to connect the oppression of pre-colonial cultures to the desecration of nature, or Margarita Cabrera’s green cacti, stitched from US border patrol uniforms by Spanish–speaking immigrants. Many of the big hitters are here – Yinka Shonibare, Sheila Hicks and Magdalena Abakanowicz among them. Step away from this show and you’ll find yourself looking at the stitches of life anew.