Joanna Barakat knew little about tatreez, the traditional style of Palestinian embroidery, when she was growing up in Los Angeles.
This was not because the Jerusalem-born artist lived far away from her native home, but because her mother and grandmother, like other women from the cities, preferred western fashion.
“The embroidery was worn by farmers, villagers and Bedouin, and less so by the women who were in the major cities – they wore western-style clothes,” Barakat, who now lives in Abu Dhabi, told The National. “My mum was raised by a mother who wasn't fond of embroidery, so she just never took to it.”
When Barakat got married, she found that the women in her husband’s family took a different approach, immersing her in the tradition. Her fascination with the craft has led her to publish an anthology of contemporary Palestinian artists who use tatreez in their work.
Narrative Threads, published by Saqi Books this month, celebrates the “immense beauty” of tatreez. The book has been five years in the making, but the outbreak of the war in Gaza and growing Jewish settler violence in the occupied West Bank have given it a new sense of urgency.
Barakat’s question was why – of all the Palestinian crafts – tatreez had become so ubiquitous. “Why is tatreez so exciting to Palestinians and not, for example, ceramics? We have ceramics, we have straw weaving, we have glass blowing, right?” she said.
Her conclusion was that the craft’s adoption by contemporary Palestinian artists gave it a more evocative symbolism. “Artists created the symbolism, which allowed Palestinians to form this connection to Palestinian embroidery, and that's why we have such an emotional response to it,” she said.
Resistance, renaissance
It is often said that western missionaries popularised Palestinian embroidery in the 19th century, by collecting examples of it and encouraging craftspeople to produce more.
But after Nakba of 1948, Palestinians searched for symbols of their national identity and of resistance. Tatreez began appearing in contemporary art in the 1960s, coinciding with the emergence of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation.
Artist Ismail Shammout, founder of the PLO’s Department of Arts and Culture in Beirut, spearheaded efforts to portray a vanishing Palestinian identity. Embroidery appeared in his own paintings of rural women, and in the works of artists he championed.
His wife Tamam Al-Akhal, who headed the arts and heritage section of the Department of Culture and Information, was even more prolific in her renderings of traditional Palestinian dress.
Barakat credits the artists Sliman Mansour and Nabil Anani for incorporating embroidery and images of Palestinian women wearing the thobe in a more abstract manner – thus cementing its role as a motif in contemporary Palestinian art.
Today, the craft appears in the video and digital works of Larissa Sansour, a prominent contemporary Palestinian artist, as well as other artists working with embroidery directly or making it a feature of their photography or paintings.
In Space Exodus (2009), Sansour imagines a future where a female astronaut, searching for a new home after losing contact with Jerusalem, places a Palestinian flag on the moon. Her white space suit features colourful, elaborate embroidery with flower motifs.
Fragile culture
The popularity of tatreez means it could escape the fate of other crafts that are vanishing as fewer people learn the skills and machine-made alternatives take hold. The brutality of the current war, which many describe as a genocide, has also mobilised Palestinians in the diaspora to preserve the cultural elements of their identity.
The urgency to do so is apparent in the paintings of Mohammed Alhaj, an artist living in Gaza whose work has been destroyed in the war, but which is documented in Barakat’s book.
Embroidery appears nostalgically as symbols in his paintings, which also feature lost architectural heritage such as traditional homes and old tiles.
The Libyan-born Palestinian artist returned to Gaza as a teenager in 1993, and has lived there ever since. He has been displaced multiple times since the war broke out and currently lives in a tent. His studio is under the rubble, Barakat said.
Sustaining communication with the artists in Gaza was a challenge. With Alhaj’s works destroyed, he relied on images he had previously taken of them – but these were not always of sufficient quality for a large art book.
“I was lucky that [the artists] had images of their artwork,” Barakat said. “Not all of it was high resolution, so we had to, with the repro company, work on those images so that they were ready for print.
“It was really important for me to include artists from Gaza in the book with all of the cultural institutions, art studios, archives, museums and so on completely destroyed,” she said.
“It was really important to document their work.”
Every gown has a story
The artists were often inspired by a person or story behind a piece of embroidery they featured in their work.
Hazem Harb, a Dubai-based artist from Gaza, said his series Sketching Unity, which appears in the book, is based on a gown that was handed to him during his last trip home in the summer of 2023.
It was embroidered with the styles of different villages – and Harb discovered that the woman who owned it could not afford to buy new dresses, and so would stitch new patterns on it. “Instead of buying a new dress, she tried to manipulate or to make a collage dress with this beautiful tatreez,” he said.
Harb hopes the adoption of tatreez in his photographic and installation work can turn it into an abstract art. “I try to repurpose tatreez from a different perspective. Not just as decorative art. But to see the tatreez as [more] an abstract than the traditional one.
For some, tatreez is a celebration of the mundane. Majd Abdel Hamid, a Beirut-based artist from Ramallah, has used tatreez on a range of fabrics and household objects. At the height of the Syrian civil war, he embroidered a map of Tadmor prison on to a tea strainer.
Abdel Hamid finds peace in the slow, laboured method of tatreez, which he uses to recreate well-known media images, commenting on the violence and conflict that surrounds him, and to deal with trauma.
His embroidery of a large white square, entitled Son, This is a Waste of Time, records the time lost cross-stitching the composition. It humorously recalls the comment of an elderly woman who dismissed his attempts to embroider an image based on avant-garde painter Kazimir Malevich's White on White painting.
Abdel Hamid has also worked on a series of painstakingly embroidered maps of the Sykes-Picot agreement, a 1916 secret treaty between Britain and France to carve up the Levant and Middle East, and abstractions reflecting on the Beirut port blast in 2020, which left him with severe head injuries.
The desire to preserve tatreez and keep the tradition alive was evident at the London launch of Narrative Threads in July, where guests of all generations, living across Europe and the US, wore embroidered gowns or accessories.
Siyal Barakat, whose family own an important collection of Palestinian gowns, came wearing a dress from Bethlehem, using the tahriri method of embroidery.
The author hopes her book will “open space for connection and conversation to Palestine and Palestinian culture”.
“I also would like people to learn the important role that artists played in creating the symbolism behind Palestinian embroidery. We still see it in the contemporary art today, and we still use those symbols, and contemporary artists have innovated those symbols, too.”
