Survival patterns: Palestinian history and resistance showcased in Sharjah tatreez exhibition

Hazem Harb had never seen a thawb quite like the one gifted to him by an elderly woman in Gaza in September 2023, weeks before war began in the Palestinian enclave.

Tattered but still vibrant, the garment was stitched together from scraps of old embroidery from across Gaza, Nablus and Ramallah. The thawb, Harb says, is about 100 years old.

The Gazan artist, who lives in Dubai, initially assumed the piece was an expression of unity, compiling diverse Palestinian tatreez motifs. The back story, however, was more poignant.

“She had made it out of poverty,” Harb says. The patchwork was not a poetic gesture, but crafted out of need. Yet, the elderly woman recognised its historic significance and gifted it to the artist in the hope that it would end up in a museum someday.

With Israel ramping up its attacks on Gaza, which have killed at least 65,000 Palestinians since October 2023, as well as destroyed artefacts and historical sites, the thawb has become even more valuable, specifically for the way it embodies a century of Palestinian identity. As with most tatreez motifs, the embroidery is not merely decorative. Every pattern reflects upon specific regional heritage as well as individual expression.

Harb highlights these aspects in Stitching Unity, a series of UV fine art prints that is directly inspired from the century-old thawb and its disparate tatreez designs.

One of the works in the series is on display at Maraya Art Centre in Sharjah, in an exhibition that showcases the history and politics of Palestinian embroidery, while also expanding its possibilities.

The impetus behind Stitching Unity, in many ways, extends to the exhibition as a whole, raising questions about the necessity of art in the face of cultural erasure.

“What’s the purpose of art?” Harb says. “What’s the purpose of being a survivor during genocide? I want my art to be part of what’s happening today. Not in a cliched way, but to preserve.

“Ninety per cent of the heritage in Gaza, today, is gone. Deliberately. Mosques, churches, libraries deliberately destroyed,” Harb adds. “We have to preserve this heritage, and not in a romantic way. It’s a duty. Even if the physical material is gone, we must find ways to preserve it.”

Sila: All That is Left to You rallies artists and embroiderers with a similar call.

Running until January 5, the exhibition is curated jointly by Maraya Art Centre’s Cima Azzam and Noor Suhail from 1971 Design Space. It brings together historical examples of tatreez alongside its contemporary interpretations.

Naima Al Majdobah’s The Sound of Thread (2022), for instance, is a video installation across several screens that assembles tatreez patterns as Midi sequences, generating music from these historical motifs. The Mantle of Justice (2025) by Omarivs puts a poignant twist on the traditional designs, embroidering minute skulls on a large silk tapestry, a symbolic representation of the devastation of Gaza.

Nakhla (2025) by Nada Debs creates a furniture piece, impressively weaving tatreez designs on rattan. Joanna Barakat’s Like (2025) reflects upon the online engagement with the tragedies in Gaza, draping a coffin-shaped box with an embroidered fabric and affixing, in front of an installation, a mobile phone that depicts the woven design.

Cristiana de Marchi, meanwhile, presents a collection of 10 white canvases, embroidered with the motif of the graveyard, with some of the pieces repeating the design edge to edge, and others leaving out empty areas, which the artist says, is meant to show “the disturbance that is imposed even on graveyards”.

The breadth of work presented is awe-inspiring, with thought-provoking takes on what tatreez could be. Curatorially, the works don’t segment from one another based on medium; instead they are arranged more organically, in a way that mirrors the dynamism and movement of the core subject.

“There has to be a play in the space,” Azzam says. “If you set the fabrics on one side and the sculptures on the other, you lose the idea of playfulness and the experimentation of tatreez. When you look at a Palestinian thawb, you look at it as a whole. The entire narrative. We tried to approach it in this matter.”

Even the walls of the exhibition tell a story. Painted a drab grey, a colour reminiscent of concrete, they are an aesthetic allusion to “the horrific reality of Palestinians”, Suhail says.

“We didn't want this exhibition to be isolated or disconnected,” she adds. “The walls are painted in a way to suggest it is unknown whether it is being constructed from scratch or whether it’s been demolished and we are rebuilding. There is room for hope.”

Hope is a prevalent emotion throughout the exhibition, resonating across every work. The act of embroidering, and the precision and time it requires, is a steadfast and determined gesture, heavy with connotations of survival and determination when considered within the context of the Palestinian experience.

Even in the works that communicate the vulnerability of the craft – such as Samar Hejazi’s Transgressed Boundaries (2020), which suspends from the ceiling fragmented pieces of tatreez fabrics, in bold greens, oranges and reds; and Areen Hassan's Weaving the Land Back (2025), which presents three works from the series showing embroidered fabrics tethered to one another with a multitude of draping threads – there is a sense of monumentality.

But, of course, embroidery doesn’t subsist without the embroiderer.

“Tatreez is very symbolic,” Suhail says. “The title of the exhibition, All That is Left to You, was chosen to symbolise tatreez as a craft or visual language, but it is also what is being said through this language. These are the values we hold on to.

“At the end of the day, it is a craft and it needs to be preserved, but what really needs to be preserved is human life and the Palestinian woman, the backbone of Palestinian society.”

The curators made a point to begin the exhibition with a work – also by Harb – that makes this message explicit. A large wooden cutout, printed with an archival photograph dated to 1889, the work shows a Palestinian woman, dressed in traditional clothing, her gaze solemn, looking back unwaveringly at the viewer.

“It was one of the first photographs of a Palestinian woman,” Harb says. “You can’t tell where exactly the photograph was taken. In the archives, the description simply wrote, in French, 'an Arab woman'.”

The cutout has been superimposed by a bold neon light, perhaps as a way of bringing out of the darkness, from the reductive descriptions of orientalist imagery, the significance of the Palestinian woman.

“They would always belittle and hide the true picture,” Harb says. “I felt that this woman was sidelined in history, relegated to the margins, as if she weren't important, as if she is just ‘an Arab woman’. The neon brings her to the spotlight.”

Palestinian women, practising embroiderers, have a prominent role within the exhibition. Many of the works were created in collaboration with weavers from the Inaash Association, a Lebanese NGO that aims to preserve and bolster the art of tatreez. Since its establishment in 1969, the association has supported more than 8,000 women across five Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. Today, about 800 embroiders work with the organisation.

In fact, the entirety of the exhibition began after a discussion with Inaash, Azzam says, and an idea of “showcasing a collection of old Palestinian thawbs”, eventually growing to explore the craft in a contemporary context as well.

Rula Alami, a board member at Inaash and founder of the Sila exhibition series, says many Palestinian women, since the Nakba of 1948, sought to pursue this tradition of tatreez as a sign of resilience. “It was a map, a coding system, and then it became a unifying symbol, a quiet one of resistance that unified embroiderers from all parts of Palestine.

“The role of Inaash was to modernise Palestinian embroidery, while keeping the aesthetics. From creating household and fashion items to art, the visual language is the same. The aesthetics are grounded in history. When you see a piece, you know that it is Palestinian,” Alami says.

Pieces in the exhibition that were created alongside embroiders from Inaash include a gridded panel from 2018 designed by Samia Halaby, with the polychromatic touch the Palestinian-American artist is famous for. The piece, measuring just under a square metre, was crafted by Inaash’s Najat Bachir and Fatima Moussa.

Another piece produced in collaboration with the organisation’s artisans is Study of a Cypress Tree by Nour Hage.

The work features three textile pieces suspended from a wooden beam. They feature explorations of the motif of the cypress tree, prevalent across embroidery traditions in Palestine.

“The tree symbolises hope and resilience. But depending on the region in Palestine, it takes different shapes,” Hage says. “This one I found embroidered on the neckline of a thawb from Gaza. In Gaza, they'd heavily embroider the necklines. It’s called the qilada or necklace motif. The belief was that jewellery held protective powers, and this embroidery held protective powers.”

The textiles in the work are dyed a rich and deep indigo, a pigment that also had protective and social symbolism. “The indigo plant used to be cultivated a lot in Palestine,” Hage says. “There used to be these big dye vats outside of villages where women would take their thawbs and dye them. The way indigo functions is, to get the darker shades you have to dip it more, and it was charged by dip.” As such, darker indigo thawbs were a sign of affluence.

The work merges the embroidery from weavers from Inaash, more crisp depictions of the cypress motif, with Hage’s frayed interpretations, streaming in bold red threads against the indigo. On the back of the work is stitched a dedication in Arabic, simply reading: For the children of Gaza.

The message is potent, especially considering it is the last work that visitors see as they exit the exhibition, underscoring the human toll of the conflict and tragedy in Palestine, much like the start of the exhibition. This is not a display of craft, but a reminder about the history and the lives that are fighting erasure.

“Things are being erased in real time in front of our eyes in Gaza,” Azzam says. “It's almost as though, like the people, we are running against time, rushing against time, to withhold and hold on to these histories and culture.”

Sila: All That is Left to You is at Maraya Art Centre until January 5