UNRWA Dress from Ramallah, Palestine (1930s) (EMPIRE LINES x Kettle’s Yard)

Curator Rachel Dedman unpicks the personal and political histories woven into Palestinian textiles, the role of the ‘embroidered woman’ and tatreez in resistance movements, and how the British Mandate changed clothes after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the 20th century.

With a century of dresses, jackets and coats - ‘hundred-year-old sisters’ - from Lebanon, Jordan, and the West Bank, a new exhibition in Cambridge shows embroidery as both a historic and living tradition, and why clothing could be some of the most significant cultural sources from Palestine today. A split-front jellayeh, stitched up after World War I, reveals how British occupation of the former Ottoman territories affected social codes. Studio photographs of urban, middle-class Jerusalemites wearing European imports - and ‘traditional’ clothes like costumes - speak to class and regional inequalities, as much as diversity.

Reading textiles like history books, curator Rachel Dedman reveals how women’s bodies have long been sites of national identity, through the Nakba (catastrophe) in 1948, Naksa (setback) in 1967, to the first Intifada against Israel. We look at a dress patched up with a United Nations Relief and Works Agency-issued bag of flour, to find histories of resistance, transnational solidarity, and economic empowerment. Plus, Rachel explains ‘auto-orientalism’, and refashions the keffiyeh, revealing the role of men in this women’s work, and deconstructing binaries between genders, arts and crafts.

Material Power: Palestinian Embroidery runs at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge until 29 October 2023, then the Whitworth in Manchester into 2024.

For more, you can read my article in gowithYamo: https://www.gowithyamo.com/blog/textiles-in-cambridge-palestinian-embroidery-at-kettles-yard

WITH: Rachel Dedman, curator, writer, and art historian, and Jameel Curator of Contemporary Art from the Middle East at Victoria and Albert Museum. Rachel is the curator of Material Power, and previously curated Labour of Love: New Approaches to Palestinian Embroidery at the Palestinian Museum, West Bank, 2018.

ART: ‘UNRWA Dress from Ramallah, Palestine (1930s)’.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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