Weaving Identity: The Exhibition Exploring Palestinian Embroidery

On 7 October, Hamas stormed into Israel, viciously claiming some 200 hostages and killing over 1,000 people. Israel used this event to inflict further mass destruction on Palestine and its people in the name of wiping out Hamas. So far, 15,000 Palestinians have been killed, over 6,000 of them children. Last week, these numbers officially surpassed those documented after the Nakba of 1948, in which more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs were violently displaced. In the past month and a half, over 2 million Palestinians have been forced to flee their country.

Since the conflict, many people have risen in solidarity, whether through protests, talks, fundraisers or pop-up art shows representing different Palestinian makers. However, one exhibition came before the rest, and it's the one we're the most interested in. Material Power: Palestinian Embroidery, curated by Rachel Dedman, opened to the public in July this year while housed in Cambridge's Kettle's Yard space. Last week, the show toured to Manchester's Whitworth Art Gallery, where it will remain on display until April next year. 'I've actually been working on this subject for about a decade', Dedman reveals while touring me around the exhibition. 'I lived in the Middle East, in Beirut, and worked in the Palestinian museum for a long time, and it was them that first commissioned me to work on Palestinian embroidery, of which I knew nothing about… and that really kick-started this long period of research of me travelling around the region, doing lots of fieldwork, meeting the women who embroider today and whose voices you'll hear throughout the show'.

Tracing the stories of womanhood, displacement, war and resistance, Material Power: Palestinian Embroidery charts the evolution of embroidery as a pastime to its symbol as a form of resistance, documenting both its significance in traditional agricultural dress and its politicisation in the 1970s. More than just an exhibition featuring old worn farming dresses (although these are imperative to the story, and there are plenty, each as beautiful as the next), Dedman has included a wide variety of objects, all spanning different mediums. Documentary footage sits opposite 70s propaganda posters borrowed from the Palestine Poster Project Archives (PPPA), while various installations, cloth sculptures and tapestries demand equal attention.

On a smaller scale, there's artist Aya Haidar's series Safe Space, which features different embroidered scenarios offering interpretations recounting her mother's memories growing up during the Lebanese Civil War. The series comprises of several hand stitched embroidery hoops depicting people performing everyday activities like watching telly, food shopping or playing in the swimming pool but there's something amiss; each have pots and pans on their head. 'To protect them from the flying bullets' Dedman tells me. At the heart of the series lies a commentary on the humorous and absurd acts people do to survive and protect those closest to them. 'These are simple everyday activities that her grandfather insisted the family take to stay safe during the war', Dedman clarifies. 'On one hand, it shows the horrific ordeals children have to go through. But to bring it back to embroidery, the very medium the artist has chosen to use means they have an intimacy, a connection to domesticity and a way of bearing witness to women’s stories that I think is really at the heart of this whole show.'

As for the other items on display, few of them are UK commissions. 'The vast majority of the pieces that we're showing come from collections in the Middle East', Dedman informs. 'We didn't just want to borrow from collections that were colonially constituted'. In total, the show spans well over 100 years, taking us from the late 19th century (the oldest garment dates back to 1880) right up to the present day, beginning with two modest garments that offer a snippet of what life was like.

'They are intensely practical and carry the traces of a woman's life and labour'. She directs my gaze to the knee patches, 'I can imagine her sitting to work with clay or make food, and over time, I can imagine those wet hands, running the linen to shreds, then patched up with some other fabric'. Adding to the garments' reflections of the women who made and wore them, Dedman goes on to note the small holes on the chest panel 'where a woman would've breast fed her babies, these would have made kind of flaps you could lift, eventually sewn up once the babies were weaned'. As for the individual patches, Dedman suggests these are dresses that have been inherited and passed down generations of women. ‘For me, they defy this notion of a museum object having a singular maker and a singular moment; they’re constantly changing, adapting and evolving in line with the women who wear them; and that for me is how we should read all these things here. You can imagine over years a dress might be worn and worn and patched up, mended, amended, stitch what is technically a new dress but is the same garment. That’s why we begin here to give people a sense of how you might read these and this intimate introduction to women’s lives.'

The following room pays more attention to luxurious modes of dress, each chosen for its specific embroidery technique, representing a different region of Palestine before the Nakba. 'Embroidery is one of these universal crafts', Dedman states, 'but what’s so unusual about Palestine is, despite it being a small country, you have all these different styles of embroidery across different regions. Each dress on show represents a different area, style, and use of textiles.' In Gaza, women favoured a Trompe-l'œil effect where they literally stitched their necklaces - often worn for talismanic reasons - onto the chest panel of their garments. In Jerusalem and Bethlehem, 'women were more likely to be Christian', says Dedman, 'and therefore, have more wealth, which meant they used this radically different style of stitch and embroidery'. Often, luxurious gold silks weaved themselves into the language of dresses these women made, and yet, despite these areas being populated with Muslims, Jewish and Christian families living side by side in the same village, religion never came into it. 'Your local identity was so much more meaningful; it meant much more than your religion.'

Halfway through the exhibition, Dedman's curation reflects on a much darker period for Palestine, starting with the Nakba of 1948, where Palestinians en masse were forced from their homes so zionist paramilitary forces could take control and declare the new state of Israel. 'I think it’s so difficult to talk about what the greatest disaster or catastrophe is because then you reduce people’s lives down to statistics and facts', states Dedman. 'For me, this dress brings to life the human effects of that tragedy because it was made by a woman in the 1930s and given to a woman who was displaced from her home. We've worked out that the person she donated it to must've been taller or broader than the original maker because you can see the dress has actually been enlarged using this sacking material from a bag of flour given to refugees in the aftermath of the crisis by the UN/the refugee works association.' How is this detail known? You can see the little UN blue mark from the word noon-e / ṭaḥīn, which translates to flour in English.

'It's a living artefact that not only speaks to the dire nature of those circumstances but also to the resilience and generosity of women shown during the height of what must’ve been the most difficult point in their lives', reveals Dedman. 'The dress is dirty and stained, but it carries a story that opens this human avenue to understanding the effects of displacement, exile and what that feels like.'

Not just bound to the notion this is woman's work, male-embroidered items by political detainees in Israeli prisons are also included. One of whom Dedman has a personal connection to. 'These were all made by a colleague of mine, Karam Maloukh, who I worked with at the museum in Palestine', she tells me, going on to acknowledge it's in this context men are most proud of what they create. 'Many women told me, "Men don't like to talk about their embroidery work because it's emasculating", but an embroiderer with crafts in prison will make with real pride, both as a way to resist their circumstances and combat boredom but also as a way of expressing love and tenderness', Dedman noted - revealing they tend to make 'small objects of affection for their wives and girlfriends, sisters, mothers and daughters. He's made this one from cardboard and covered it in cheap velvet, both very humble materials, and it has his initials on one side, then his wife's on the other.' There's something quite unexpectedly beautiful about including these objects in the show, especially when considered in relation to Dedman's curation, which purposefully pivots around the idea of embroidery embodying female labour and resilience. 'On the one hand, embroidery cements certain gender roles', she tells me. 'And yet, it also mediates the refusal of those because it defies what you might think of men doing or women doing in protest and so on.'

As for using embroidery to help manifest resistance, power and pride, this room also houses a variety of dresses made in the 1970s featuring delicate embroidery of the nation’s flag - which was illegal to bear after the Arab-Israeli six day war in 1967. 'Men were being shot at protests or arrested, so women took up this different role in front line struggle', reveals Dedman. Flags were banned and so to work around the law, women would embroider these 'explicit motifs of nationalism' onto their dresses. Armed forces had no way of confiscating the garments, but they certainly weren't welcomed as all sorts of symbols were embraced from precious architectural sites and the 'Ship of Return' to a Gazan necklace motif seen earlier.

'These would’ve taken months, even years to sew', Dedman tells me. 'In secret, at home, under various treacherous conditions. Maybe your village is besieged, you don’t have electricity, women are stitching these by candlelight and they’re buying these colours separately so they wouldn’t attract suspicion that they’re buying nationally-covered threads. For me, that’s what is so extraordinary. And the time involved reflects the nature of Palestinian resistance. It’s not an event, it’s a process, a movement, something on going; it’s a lifetime.' Protest signs are meant to be throwaway items, completely contradictory to the circumstances in which these dresses were made under. Despite the phrase feeling trite here, they're, at the very least, a labour of love.

Since the beginning of time, the notion of 'stitching to salve the bereaved' has been embedded into the artistic practice of sewing. You only have to look at the HIV quilts to realise this. Even the journalist Charlie Porter touched upon these ideas in his latest book Bring No Clothes: Bloomsbury and the Philosophy of Fashion, where he talks about the acts of stitching to mend more than just a piece of fabric. Although not an overarching theme in Material Power, when you fuse politics with embroidery to reflect on the history of Palestine, it becomes glaringly obvious. Embroidery doesn't save lives, we're not saying it does. But it is deeply entrenched within the nation’s identity, shown via Dedman’s wilful approach that uses it to trace generational trauma with thread. If Palestine is to be remembered for anything, it’s the colour, richness, beauty and sheer bravery its inhabitants have fiercely expressed, qualities passed down from generation to generation.