Among the images that travelled to Sana’a in 2025 from collections such as the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford were photographs of historic Yemeni dresses, and the women who received them were set a task that any embroiderer will recognise as ambitious: to work out how each garment was stitched, largely from the picture alone. Twenty-five of them took it on, and the results are now hanging in King’s Cross.
Photos: Jonathan Goldberg and Courtesy of Aga Khan Centre Gallery
Yemeni Embroidery: Preserving Heritage, Empowering Lives grew out of a programme developed by the Yemen Noor Foundation (YENOF) and Improving Livelihoods through Cultural Initiatives (IL-CI). It was initiated by IL-CI founder Isabelle Caussé and supported by the ALIPH Foundation. Each participant was assigned a traditional dress from a particular region of Yemen. The garments came from within Yemen and from ethnographic collections abroad, and the images were generously provided by institutions and private collectors. The women looked closely, ran practical workshops to test what they had seen, then translated the stitches and motifs of their dress into a new wall piece, now on show at the Aga Khan Centre Gallery.
Jonathan Goldberg and Courtesy of Aga Khan Centre Gallery
It helps to know that traditional Yemeni embroidery, called Al-Tatriz, is tied tightly to place. Each region has its own geometric patterns, its own favoured colours and its own metallic threads, including silver and gold work locally known as "sim". Studying a dress, then, means reading a home address in thread, and the women were learning to read addresses that were not their own as well as ones that were.
The embroidery workshops behind the project began in 2013, set up to give women from low-income households, many with little access to formal education, skills that could help support their families and keep their children in school. The programme has since widened its doors. Daughters now join their mothers, because younger, educated Yemeni women have grown keen to pick up traditional skills and reconnect with a heritage they want to carry forward.
Left: A Halah and right: Khayzaran work in progress Copyright: YENOF
Only some of the seventy-plus women in the embroidery programme took part in this project, yet what the group learned has travelled well beyond it. Beadwork and sequin techniques in particular gave the women fresh ways to express themselves, and they also opened a path to accessible, marketable pieces that can earn a living.
Jonathan Goldberg and Courtesy of Aga Khan Centre Gallery
Gallery curator Esen Salma Kaya hopes the display marks the start of a longer relationship. She imagines a future project in which the women respond to a specially developed exhibition theme, researching and making a bespoke body of work for a professional show in London. They cannot travel to see their embroidery hanging in the gallery, but digital platforms let them watch it being valued from home.
The exhibition runs from 29 October 2026 to 28 February 2027, which leaves plenty of time to see what twenty-five women made after studying a photograph and picking up a needle.
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Further Information:
Yemeni Embroidery: Preserving Heritage, Empowering Lives is on show now at the Aga Khan Centre, Kings Cross, London, until 28 February 2027.
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Image Credits:
Lead: Photo by Jonathan Goldberg and Courtesy of Aga Khan Centre Gallery.
All further images as credited in captions.