When Palestinian Arabs were displaced during the first conflict with Israel in 1948, women started to stitch flowers on the chests of their garden dresses, one for each person forced to flee. In acknowledging these individual losses, these plain goods soon bloomed; becoming more beautiful for all the wrong reasons. Today, they stand as sources, a wardrobe of war.

Such everyday textiles open Material Power. With a century of dresses, jackets and coats – or ‘hundred-year-old sisters’ - from Lebanon, Jordan, and the West Bank, this exhibition highlights embroidery as both a historic and living tradition, and perhaps some of the most significant cultural sources from Palestine today. 

Curator Rachel Dedman reads these beautiful garments like history books. Many are symbols of women’s resistance, and others their economic resourcefulness. We see skirts rubbed bare by workers’ wet hands, and holes poked out near the chest, an adaptation for breastfeeding in the field. (Missing is the egg-in-pan pattern, a nod to how women traded their hens’ produce for threads.) The clothes from Galilee come reversible; in India, it’s so that farmers dressing in the dark of dawn never have to worry about putting their clothes on inside out.  

Respect is implied in the sheer number of, and space given to, these textiles. The wealth of different stitches, patterns, and motifs is a testament to their diversity. Clothes from Jaffa come covered in oranges, olives, and sesame seeds, goods which flowed from the city by boat and train. In Bethlehem, we find crosses worn by both Christians and Muslims, a hint at how regional identities sometimes matter more than religious ones. Silver Yemeni Jewish jewellery, displayed nearby, accessorises the point. 

A split-front coat-dress, or jellayeh, from Hebron, highlights how the British Mandate post-World War I affected dress and social codes in Palestine. The traditional slit down the skirt was sewn closed to conform to changing modesty standards, as territories ‘changed handed’ from the collapsed Ottoman Empire; challenging stereotypes about historic conservativism and the nature of imperial rule. 

Archive photographs and materials – more layers atop this exhibition – are used here to a disarming effect. Urban, middle-class Palestinians had long worn European and Ottoman dress; imported cottons were important signs of wealth and status. In studio photographs, we see women wearing these ‘traditional’ clothes like costumes in living museums. They reveal as much regional inequality as regional diversity - perhaps closing the gap between the source of these fabrics, and the location of their current display.

We see how women’s bodies became - or were exposed as long being – sites onto which to project political and nationalist ideas. The symbol of the ‘embroidered woman’ became particularly prominent after the Nakba (catastrophe) in 1948, and Naksa (setback) in 1967. Dedman is explicit on the gendering of resistance, as women’s bodies are ‘flattened’ into the landscape. ‘Her body and clothing become the literal stuff of the earth: her headdress sculpted into farmers and fighters, her hair the flag of the nation’. 

More surprising stories are implicit in the way we move through the works themselves. From the post-war poverty evident in a dress patched with a UN-issued sack of flour, to the puffed sleeves of New Dresses in the 1960s, we see the rapid transformation of Palestine; in part, due to increased wealth from oil. The nation strides confidently into the first Intifada (1987-1993) and, with ingenuity, dodges the censorship of the flag by wearing clothes shaded black and white, green and red. (The London-based Tatreez Collective – who have recently collaborated with both Leighton House and Shubbak Festival 2023 - highlight how similarly-coloured watermelons are still used in protest too.)

Textiles support the resistance in more banal ways too. Here we find the men, stitching to stifle boredom during their incarceration in Israeli prisons. Dedman’s deft curation acknowledges both the construction of gender norms, and the ‘softness’ of these social boundaries. An unwound keffiyeh – adopted by Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat after the first Arab Revolt and Nakba – is deconstructed, even disarmed, by Khalil Rabah.

Rabah’s ‘Tattoo’ has previously been displayed in the open, on the floor. But even behind glass, it remains a moving piece of contemporary art, which too locates the region within more global movements. Today, just one factory still manufactures the headscarf, the domestic industry in a struggle against cheap imports from Asia.

Transnational solidarities are clear in the wealth of archive exhibition posters, here nestled next to by Aya Haidar’s contemporary embroidery hoops, recalling her memories of civil war in Lebanon. These vividly coloured threads recall the synthetic ‘foreign rainbow’ dyes first imported by the French textile company, DMC, in the 1930s, and readily appropriated by wealthy Palestinians. It circles back to local agency, a subtle protest against any foreign definitions of what makes an ‘authentic’ textile. 

Whilst Dedman sees embroidery as a ‘universal human craft’, she argues it is regional differences that make the practice in Palestine unique. It’s a bold claim; there’s certainly scope for shows about the Indian subcontinent, the Balkans, or the Mediterranean, the latter currently condensed in a small display at Cambridge’s nearby Fitzwilliam Museum.

It may simply be a response to a particularly English failure to honour textile work as art; similar exhibitions at the Institut du Monde Arabe (IMA) in Paris speak to how much we have to catch up with institutions across the world.  

Dedman’s curation is a delightful blend of both indulgence, and instrumentalisation; in any case, a deafening whisper against the false division of art and craft. Indeed, the precision this practice demands extends even to the ‘tidy backs’ of this embroideries – an intimate detail reserved for its wearer. By weaving together the histories of both women and textiles - both marginalised, the latter oft dismissed as material culture – the exhibition takes on a life of its own. 

With its wealth of archive materials, intimate video interviews featuring women in their own words, and textiles to touch and access, Material Power is a force to be reckoned with. (Fingers crossed, her new post at the V&A will see some similarly radical readings into their rich textile collection too.)

With works from 1870 to 2023 – the contemporary and historic here together in conversation – Dedman uses textiles to tell global histories of the 20^th century, highlighting continuities as much as changes. Many are on display for the first time in the UK, but the last such exhibition was in 1989. Arguably, this radical reading of clothes is even before important, given how war in Israel-Palestine and the SWANA region more widely, threaten the destruction of conventional historical sources. 

Nothing has been removed or censured from Dedman’s first exhibition for The Palestinian Museum in Lebanon, only condensed. Beyond archive exhibition posters – of which we can never quite see enough – another section squashed is the contemporary commodification of clothes and fashion. So important was this issue in Lebanon show that it lent its name to the title, Labour of Love, unravelling textiles’ renewed economic role for women working from refugee camps, and the complexities in their production for international NGOs, rather than local consumption. 

Textiles can create both virtuous and vicious cycles for women; of social entrapment, as much as economic liberation. Addressing these issues always brings us back to history, downstairs, we see nomadic, Bedouin culture is connected with the introduction of cars and busses, permitting women to travel to markets, and motifs to migrate like people. 

Joining Gee’s Bend quilts at the Royal Academy, and Black British interior design displayed at Manchester’s Whitworth, where this exhibition will travel next, Material Power stands on the front line of textile shows in Britain today. (A thread that, no doubt, will be picked up at the Barbican’s Unravel in 2024 too.) 

Intersecting with global, gendered subjects, these shows only reinforce who – and what – makes up the fabric of our society today. 

‍

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

For more on Material Power, listen to this episode of the EMPIRE LINES podcast, with curator Rachel Dedman.

Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!