Collect, the annual fair for contemporary craft and design, celebrates its 20th edition this week with a bumper crop of 40 international galleries representing more than 400 artists at Somerset House. It’s a textural feast, featuring museum-quality pieces handmade in ceramics, glass, lacquer, textiles, wood, metal, paper, resin, corn-starch and more.

Each object – from vessels and furniture to wall hangings and art jewellery – has a story to tell. Among our highlights are textile works by Juan Arango Palacios and and Talia Ramkilawan, exploring queerness and memories; collaborative ceramic vessels by father and daughter duo Chris and Freya Bramble-Carter, in which faces emerge from ocean-like glazes; and glass shipwrecks by James Devereux

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.