This assessment is a part of a collection of Should-See reveals, during which a author delivers a snapshot of a present exhibition
Showcasing girls’s weaving traditions in Palestine as a residing, materials tradition, Hayy Jameel’s newest exhibition, ‘Thread Reminiscence: Embroidery from Palestine’, types an ‘imperfect chronology’, in accordance with curator Rachel Dedman, whose work with textiles from the area spans a decade.
Certainly, with the exhibition’s unfastened construction of gown clusters, the satan is within the particulars. Take the embroidered chest panel on a blood-stained Nineteen Twenties gown from Beit Nabala – one in all 530 villages destroyed by Zionist militia through the 1948 Nakba (the mass displacement of Palestinians through the Arab-Israeli conflict) – which includes a detachable breastfeeding flap and alterations to accommodate a altering physique, a practical design suited to a rural lady working within the fields. Elsewhere, Gazan attire on show from the identical period, which boast vivid motifs that mimic amulets or talismans, current evocative reminders of a time when ornamentation was a consideration for unusual girls – a jarring distinction to the at the moment genocide-stricken area, the place the one concern is survival. Additional on this actuality, Updates from Gaza (2024–25), a three-channel video set up produced by the Palestinian Museum and edited by Ahmad Badarneh, reveals WhatsApp conversations that doc the destruction of three Gazan museum collections – in Jawdat Al Khoudary, Rafah and Al Qarara – lowering the tragedy of the cultural casualties of conflict to a stay scroll.
With works located between practical aesthetics and radical politics, the exhibition contains embroidered kohl holders, British Mandate-era images and Nineteen Seventies political posters illustrating how girls turned instrumentalized as nationwide symbols. One standout is an Intifada gown from 1987, which depicts parrots perched above Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock shrine amid lush foliage whereas additionally subverting the prohibition of Palestinian flags in public protest by subtly embedding the nationwide colors in opposition to pale blue material. Not like current exhibitions on fibre artwork, these textiles will not be offered as summary installations however grasp on mannequins to point out how they had been supposed to be worn.
I left the present reflecting not solely on the encoded tropes of nationalism and fecundity adorning girls’s our bodies, but additionally on the duty to think about, from an eco-feminist perspective, which matrilineal craft histories are appropriated as instruments of resistance and why.
‘Thread Reminiscence: Embroidery from Palestine’ is on view at Hayy Jameel, Jeddah, till 17 April
Major picture: ‘Thread Reminiscence: Embroidery from Palestine’, 2025, exhibition view. Courtesy: Artwork Jameel; {photograph}: Mohammed Eskandarani
