Rachel Dedman explores Palestinian embroidery and its relationship to resistance.
Embroidery is the most important cultural material of Palestine. This ancient practice, called tatreez in Arabic, is characterised by remarkable beauty and complexity. Beginning with an introduction to embroidery’s traditional making in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this lecture traces Palestinian embroidery’s adoption as a touchstone of national heritage following the Nakba of 1948. It examines its subsequent politicisation, through PLO policy and the work of artists, and eventual commodification and production in the present.
During the First Intifada, 1987-1993, ‘Intifada Dresses’ were made by women and worn on the frontlines of protest, at a time when Palestinian flags and colours were banned in public. On these dresses, traditional embroidered motifs mingle with doves, rifles, and signs of allegiance to political parties, rendering women’s bodies active sites of resistance. Addressing these alongside embroidery made by male political prisoners held in Israeli prisons, Dedman reflects on craft’s contribution to the construction and refusal of gendered roles in the Palestinian resistance.
Bringing together embroidered dress, archival material, commissioned film, and the work of contemporary artists, the lecture reflects on the enduring critical power of embroidery in both past and present.
Following the lecture, Rachel Dedman will be in conversation with Osman Yousefzada, artist and writer.
Organised by Unsettled Subjects: Unsettled Subjects is an interdisciplinary collective of architectural educators and researchers, whose members hail from diverse institutions across the UK (including The Courtauld), Europe and Africa. We seek to understand the political present by engaging critically and collectively with texts and ideas – through reading, research and creative practice – in order to interrogate issues of identity, race, ethnicity, gender, sex, sexuality, class, and power.
Speakers
Rachel Dedman is a curator, writer, and art historian. Her work examines the material and political lives of things, and challenges established narratives around cultural production in the Global South. Rachel is the Jameel Curator of Contemporary Art from the Middle East at the V&A, London, where she curates the triennial Jameel Prize exhibition and the Jameel Fellowship artist residency programme. In 2023/24, Rachel curated Material Power: Palestinian Embroidery for Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, and The Whitworth, Manchester, which grew out of years of research and curatorial work for the Palestinian Museum, Birzeit, West Bank.
Between 2013 and 2019, Rachel was an independent curator based in Beirut, Lebanon, where she curated projects across the region, including for Ashkal Alwan, Sursock Museum, Beirut Art Center, apexart, the Arab Image Foundation and the Palestinian Museum. Rachel is currently co-curating the State of Fashion Biennale 2024 in the Netherlands, and the seventh Jameel Prize for the V&A. Trained in the history of art at Oxford and Harvard Universities, Rachel’s research ad critical writing are widely published, and she is the author of two books on Palestinian embroidery and dress: At the Seams and Labour of Love.
Osman Yousefzada is a British-Pakistani artist and writer, born in Birmingham, whose work engages with the representation, rupture and reimagining of the immigrant experience. His work incorporates textiles, moving image, installations, sculpture and performance. Yousefzada has shown at international institutions including: Whitechapel Gallery, London; Ikon Gallery, Birmingham; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio; Ringling Museum, Florida; Lahore Museum, Pakistan; and Design Museum, London. Lahore Biennale, Pakistan and Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh.
Recent solo shows include Queer Feet (2024) at Charleston, Embodiments of Memory (2024) at the Ceramics Biennale, Potteries Museum in Stoke on Trent. His large scale series of solo interventions What Is Seen and What Is Not at London’s V&A in 2022, was commissioned by the British Council in partnership with the V&A. In April 2024, he presents a major show in conjunction with the 60th Venice Biennale at the Palazzo Franchetti. In the following month he opens a prelude to Bradford City of Culture 2025 at Cartwright Hall.
He is a visiting Professor of Interdisciplinary Practice at the Birmingham School of Art, BCU, a visiting Fellow at the Jesus College, Cambridge University and a Research Practitioner at the Royal College of Art. Yousefzada is also the author of The Go-Between: A Memoir of Growing Up Between Different Worlds (2022), a coming-of-age story described by Stephen Fry as ‘one of the greatest childhood memoirs of our time’.
