Must-See: Threading Resistance Through Palestinian Embroidery

This review is part of a series of Must-See shows, in which a writer delivers a snapshot of a current exhibition  

Showcasing women’s weaving traditions in Palestine as a living, material culture, Hayy Jameel’s latest exhibition, ‘Thread Memory: Embroidery from Palestine’, forms an ‘imperfect chronology’, according to curator Rachel Dedman, whose work with textiles from the region spans a decade.

Indeed, with the exhibition's loose structure of dress clusters, the devil is in the details. Take the embroidered chest panel on a blood-stained 1920s dress from Beit Nabala – one of 530 villages destroyed by Zionist militia during the 1948 Nakba (the mass displacement of Palestinians during the Arab-Israeli war) – which incorporates a removable breastfeeding flap and alterations to accommodate a changing body, a functional design suited to a rural woman working in the fields. Elsewhere, Gazan dresses on display from the same era, which boast vivid motifs that mimic amulets or talismans, present evocative reminders of a time when ornamentation was a consideration for ordinary women – a jarring contrast to the currently genocide-stricken region, where the only concern is survival. Further on this reality, Updates from Gaza (2024–25), a three-channel video installation produced by the Palestinian Museum and edited by Ahmad Badarneh, exhibits WhatsApp conversations that document the destruction of three Gazan museum collections – in Jawdat Al Khoudary, Rafah and Al Qarara – reducing the tragedy of the cultural casualties of war to a live scroll.

With works situated between functional aesthetics and radical politics, the exhibition includes embroidered kohl holders, British Mandate-era photographs and 1970s political posters illustrating how women became instrumentalized as national symbols. One standout is an Intifada dress from 1987, which depicts parrots perched above Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock shrine amid lush foliage while also subverting the prohibition of Palestinian flags in public protest by subtly embedding the national colours against pale blue fabric. Unlike recent exhibitions on fibre art, these textiles are not presented as abstract installations but hang on mannequins to show how they were intended to be worn.

I left the show reflecting not only on the encoded tropes of nationalism and fecundity adorning women's bodies, but also on the responsibility to consider, from an eco-feminist perspective, which matrilineal craft histories are appropriated as tools of resistance and why.

‘Thread Memory: Embroidery from Palestine’  is on view at Hayy Jameel, Jeddah, until 17 April 

_{Main image: ‘Thread Memory: Embroidery from Palestine’, 2025, exhibition view. Courtesy: Art Jameel; photograph: Mohammed Eskandarani}