Talks At The Seams
As part of At the Seams' ongoing public program, the Palestinian Museum and Dar el-Nimer are organising a day of conversation and discussion on Saturday 23rd July, from 10am until 4pm.
At the Seams explores Palestinian material culture, both historic and contemporary, reflecting on the political potential of craft and clothing. TALKS AT THE SEAMS brings together speakers working in a diverse range of fields to open discussion around and beyond embroidery and Palestine.
Themes under discussion include embroidery in the work of Intifada-era artists; the history of traveling PLO folklore exhibitions; the problematics of archiving oral histories of Palestine; the ethics of embroidery's circulation as commodity, and the work of NGOs; and embroidery in contemporary artistic practice.
PROGRAM
10am
Rachel Dedman, welcome and introduction
10.30am – 12pm
Kristine Khouri, Culture as Diplomacy
Kirsten Scheid, Stronger than Landscape: tartriz and artists of the first Intifada
Elliot Reichert, Unravelled
Coffee
12.15pm – 1.45pm
Rosemary Sayigh, Embroidery as Return
Rachel Dedman, Imperfect Commodities
Saba Sadr, Bringing Palestinian Embroidery and Artisans into NGOs
Lunch
2.30pm – 4pm
Hana Sleiman, Archiving Palestinian Oral History: problematics of mediation
Odessa Warren, The Palestinian Museum: a case for new museology
Studio Kawakeb, Through the Wall
ABSTRACTS
Kristine Khouri, Culture as Diplomacy
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, various departments in the PLO organised touring exhibitions of Palestinian art and folklore with a mission to disseminate Palestinian cultural production and heritage throughout the world. Folklore exhibitions, in particular, are the most solid incarnation of cultural diplomacy. The presentation will give a brief history of these initiatives.
Kirsten Scheid, Stronger than Landscape: tartriz and artists of the first Intifada
For an older generation of artists struggling to understand their social position during the Intifada of 1989-1993, tartriz offered an important resource. Yet their handling of it demonstrates the limits of their willingness to learn from this aesthetic system, which did not dovetail with their spokesperson status. This talk examines the use of tartriz in the Intifada-era work of Sleiman Mansour, Nabil Anani, and Taysir Sharaf.
Elliot Reichert, Unravelled
Elliot Reichert will discuss the Beirut Art Center's upcoming exhibition Unravelled. Curated by Rachel Dedman and Marie Muracciole, the group exhibition examines the relationship between the labour and craft of embroidery in the practices of more than a dozen artists from the Middle East, Europe, and the United States. Looking closely at a few key works, Reichert will discuss themes of labour and materiality, image-making and concealing, and decoration and destruction, that organise the exhibition.
Rosemary Sayigh, Embroidery as Return
This presentation will review change in perspectives towards the Palestinian refugees here in Lebanon from the 1950s until today. This will explain the relative absence of the thawb here in the early period, and the predominance of signifiers of Palestinian embroidery since 1970. The PLO period [1970-1982] changed Lebanese-Palestinian interaction as well as culture in the camps. Today, with a national leadership that no longer represents Palestinians outside the OPT, wearing items of Palestinian embroidery has a different meaning and message.
Rachel Dedman, Imperfect Commodities
This presentation examines Palestinian embroidery as an 'imperfect commodity', exploring some of the ethical and social problematics concerning its contemporary production and circulation in a marketplace. What ideologies and infrastructures dominate this industry? How is embroidery perceived by those who make it today? The talk draws on the fieldwork and interviews conducted for At the Seams, including the database of 100+ embroidery organisations (dating from 1925 until 2015) built during the course of the research.
Saba Sadr, Bringing Palestinian Embroidery and Artisans into NGOs
The focus of this talk is to bring into context the story and application of the largely embroidery-based Women's Workshop at Basmeh and Zeitooneh. The speaker will also offer her experience and opinion of her first independent carpet weaving workshop, and her acquired knowledge as a project coordinator at Basmeh and Zeitooneh, while raising questions about public practice and incorporating an existing craft with significant history and origins in an NGO targeting refugees.
Hana Sleiman, Archiving Palestinian Oral History: problematics of mediation
The talk will discuss the process and methodology of developing the Palestinian Oral History Archive. In doing so the talk will touch on the problematic of mediation through archiving and exhibiting, and the challenges and opportunities involved in placing a grassroots archive in an academic institution.
Odessa Warren, The Palestinian Museum: A Case for New Museology
As an institution, the Palestinian Museum seeks to be borderless in order to connect and represent Palestinians across the world. This talk takes a look at the ways in which the museum plans to achieve its stated aims by focussing on its borderless, thematic and digital nature. The implications that the museum has for ‘new museology’ is discussed and the talk asks what it means to establish a museum under occupation, while forging new and innovative ways to tell and represent a multitude of narratives in a context where Palestinian voices are systematically persecuted and silenced.
Studio Kawakeb, Through the Wall
Studio Kawakeb will share the process and outputs of their children’s workshop designed to explore Palestinian Heritage through the practice of Palestinian embroidery. In addition, the studio will elaborate on their format of interactive learning experiences as an alternative method of education.
Image: from the INAASH Archive
