Thread Memory: Embroidery from Palestine at V&A Dundee

In the Palestinian Museum's archives, there's a photograph from 1935 showing women from Ramallah working collectively on their tatreez. Their heads bent over fabric, fingers working in practiced rhythm, they couldn't have imagined their embroidery would one day serve as historical testimony. Yet that's exactly what Thread Memory: Embroidery from Palestine reveals.

Fatima Yousef Sewing a Palestinian thobe, Kobar-Ramallah, the 1970s, Palestinian Museum Digital Archive.

Curated by Rachel Dedman, and in partnership with Hayy Jameel, Jeddah, and the Palestinian Museum, Birzeit , the exhibition unspools across the V&A Dundee. Each dress presents evidence of regional variations in tatreez, revealing the logic in necessity - each stitch sewn according to the demands of daily life. In Galilee's agricultural north, women developed lighter embroidery on long coats - practical adaptations for heavy fieldwork that left little time for elaborate decoration. Move south to the more affluent areas of Bethlehem and Jerusalem, and the story changes: gold and silver metallic threads create elaborate surfaces that speak of merchant wealth and urban leisure. 

Widow’s dress, Bir al-Saba’, 1960-1970, The Palestinian Museum Collection. Donated by Laila Atawneh.

The psychology embedded in colour choices also run deep within the aesthetics. When Bedouin women used indigo to dye their bright threads blue during mourning, they created garments that literally faded back to life. The chemistry of the dye matched the process of grief - intense darkness gradually revealing the colours beneath. The chemistry of the fabric held emotional truth, becoming a medium for healing long before such language existed in therapy.

Thread Memory on Display. Photo credit: Grant Anderson

Curator Rachel Dedman's approach treats these dresses as primary sources rather than decorative objects. Having spent over a decade documenting Palestinian textile traditions, she understands that tatreez functions as both art and archive. The patterns themselves preserve agricultural cycles, religious festivals, even political allegiances - information encoded by women who rarely left written records.

Leena Nammari with her artwork 'Absence does not mean forgetting'. Photo credit: Grant Anderson

Contemporary artists in the exhibition demonstrate how this visual vocabulary adapts without losing meaning. Aya Haidar's plastic bags embroidered with ancient motifs transform refugee emergency supplies into objects of beauty and defiance. Leena Nammari's 626 clay tablets, each representing a destroyed Palestinian village, extend this fierce declaration of dignity. Her tablets preserve embroidery patterns that might otherwise disappear with their villages—craft as resistance against erasure.

Dress from Gaza, 2000-2010, Rafah Museum Collection, with thanks to its Director, Dr Suhaila Shaheen.

The exhibition's timing amplifies its significance. Opening during unprecedented destruction in Gaza, Thread Memory insists on Palestinian cultural continuity. The dress above bears visible damage from the 2023 bombing of Rafah Museum. It was damaged in the targeted bombing of the Rafah Museum in Gaza, whose collections were largely destroyed by Israel in 2023. The force of an explosion threw the dress onto a roof, where it was inaccessible for 8 months until the museum’s team could retrieve it. As well as the violence of the bombing, exposure to the elements has left its marks on the garment – the fabric has been weakened by the rain and bleached by the sun. Yet the dress endures, its damaged threads testament to survival.

Dundee's 45-year relationship with Nablus provides the exhibition's political framework. The two cities twinned in 1980, offering a poignant local context. The Palestinian flag has flown at the City Chambers even when banned in Palestine itself. Here, cultural exchange has long been a quiet form of solidarity.

This exhibition maps a disappeared world through embroidery alone. They prove that women's domestic labour - so often overlooked - has, stitch by stitch, preserved entire histories. In their patterns, threads, and silences, a people endures.

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Further Information:

V&A Dundee: Thread Memory: Embroidery from Palestine

If you would like to learn more about the history, culture, and techniques of tatreez embroidery, take a look at the following workshop with the Tatreez Collective: 

Stitching Palestinian Heritage with the Tatreez Collective - Museum of the Home, London

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Image Credits:

Lead Image: 

Detail of dress from Ramallah, 1930-1940, V&A. 

Ramallah dresses were typically made of linen, woven in Palestine. Summer dresses used the natural colour of the linen (these were known as roumi), while winter dresses were dyed dark blue with indigo. Those with pointed (irdan) sleeves were a status symbol, but slightly impractical, so women would knot them behind their backs as they worked outside.

All other images as credited in photo captions.