After a year and a half of watching Palestine fall apart at the seams, Thread Memory: Embroidery from Palestine, an exhibition at Hayy Jameel in the Saudi city of Jeddah feels like an act of spiritual mending.
Thread Memory, curated by Rachel Dedman and on until 17 April, explores the historical and enduring power of the ancient Palestinian tradition of tatreez – or elaborate hand embroidery – a matrilineal craft primarily undertaken by women.
The exhibition utilises the extraordinary collection of the Palestinian Museum in Birzeit, presenting over 30 dresses, archival photographs and objects from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries up until today.
Private collections from diaspora communities in Saudi and elsewhere have also been tapped and include elaborate jewellery, headdresses, ephemera, and old tourist posters displayed next to the likes of contemporary video art.
Three platforms display a variety of thobes – or traditional embroidered dresses – framed by walls displaying photographs of women wearing and making tatreez as well as art inspired by it, photos of disappeared villages, maps of a lost homeland, and tourist posters from the last century.
archival photos from Palestine [Art Jameel/Photography Mohammed Eskandarani]
The whole effect feels like a Palestinian grandmother’s jumbo sale, curated by her young hip granddaughter.
There is an immediate sense of intimacy, of family and community that befits an exhibition inspired by tatreez — which was included on the UNESCO list of intangible world heritage in 2022.
The thobes narrate the stories of cities, towns and villages through intricate folk art motifs; some symbols are said to date from Canaanite times (1800-1200BC) but thobes originated in the early 19th century and came of age as symbols of Palestinian nationalism after the Nakba in 1948.
The exhibition highlights how tatreez reflects the social and cultural identity of the Palestinian people, tracing its evolution through the Nakba, the First Intifada and Gaza today.
“The exhibition centres clothing as a home for the body, an intimate site for the expression of identity, tracing its evolution since the Nakba of 1948 into a practice of kinship and community. Tatreez originated in rural communities, embedded in village life and women’s rites of passage, with each region having its own distinctive style of dress. Historically, the motifs of tatreez varied by region, reflecting local stories, techniques, textiles, legends, flora, fauna and cultural beliefs,” notes the curatorial statement.
Rachel Dedman brings over a decade of expertise in Palestinian embroidery and dress to the exhibition, and is the Victoria and Albert’s Jameel Curator of Contemporary Art from the Middle East.
In March of 2022, the Palestinian Museum announced a collaboration with the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London to conserve traditional textiles thanks to a $484,298 grant from the Aliph Foundation (the International Alliance for the Protection of Heritage in Conflict Areas).
The first partnership between the two museums, which continued through December of 2023, aimed to develop the capacities of the Palestinian Museum’s collections department, establishing the first dedicated textile conservation studio in Palestine.
At the time, around 100 dresses were donated to the museum by Palestinian and Arab American women from the US-based Committee for the Preservation of Palestinian Heritage, as well as by a collector in France.
In Jeddah, the collection has been augmented by women in the considerable Saudi diaspora.
The exhibition at Hayy Jameel traces regional styles including embroidery from Jerusalem, Ramallah, Beit Dajan and Bedouin communities, as well as traditions from the Palestinian diaspora.
The curatorial statement also noted the matrilineal craft passed down from mother to daughter: “These designs have evolved over generations into a powerful visual reflecting cultural identity and heritage.”
In a statement, Antonia Carver, the Director of Art Jameel, said: “Thread Memory builds on more than 10 years of research and earlier exhibitions in Palestine, Lebanon and the UK curated by Rachel Dedman on tatreez and textiles. We are honoured to be hosting this exhibition which introduces the Saudi public to one of the region’s most critical and storied collections at the Palestinian Museum, plus dresses on loan from local, personal collections in Saudi.
“Art Jameel has a longstanding focus on cultural continuity and exchange, and on foregrounding discursive exhibitions and programmes that recover and document histories and traditions. During these times of turmoil, violence and grief, it feels vital to tell everyday stories of survival, even joy, and to highlight resilience through creativity and artisanship.”
The exhibition features many highlights, but each individual piece connects to a collective whole, charting a new textural map of Palestine, woven from pure love and memory.
One photo features a family in traditional dress dancing dabke under a photo of Yasser Arafat; another features a grandmother embroidering with her grandchildren; in another, a young woman proudly wears a 70’s style halter dress with tatreez complemented by platform boots and a defiant gaze, while one shows a Palestinian nun embroidering next to a traditional limestone house.
These mid-century Kodachrome moments that feel like ephemera from family reunions are juxtaposed by older, more formal feeling black and white images: a map of Palestine from 1838, women in traditional dress circa 1900, a family in Ottoman style dress from 1908.
A section called Heritage as Resistance features highlights from the Palestine Poster Project Archive, including a richly coloured one by iconic artist Sliman Mansour, depicting a woman in a thobe holding oranges as a kind of romanticised nationalist heroine.
Another by Abdul Rahman al Muzayen called Glory to the Revolution, published by Fatah in 1979, also features a woman in a thobe in a black and white graphic style complemented by Arabic calligraphy that feels both ancient and modern.
Rather like tatreez itself: an art that gathers the broken threads of Palestinian history into a beautiful, tactile whole.
Cover image: Fatima Yousef Sewing a Palestinian thobe, Kobar-Ramallah, the 1970s [Palestine Museum]
Hadani Ditmars is the author of Dancing in the No Fly Zone and has been writing from and about the MENA since 1992. Her next book, Between Two Rivers, is a travelogue of ancient sites and modern culture in Iraq. www.hadaniditmars.com
