Artist Spotlight: Nour Shantout

Q. You've mentioned questioning the "overly familiar aesthetics of museums." How do museums present in this way?  

Nour Shantout: Museums present themselves as neutral spaces of knowledge, but their history in the Global North is deeply intertwined with colonialism. Especially in the case of ethnographic museums that were built through colonial looting, and their collections carry the violent conditions under which they were taken. Objects in these collections are subjected to a process of systematic fragmentation that aims to detach colonised and Indigenous people from their histories and cultures.

However, ethnographic museums today avoid offering alternative narratives that challenge how these objects have been archived and displayed, remaining silent about the origins of their collections. The overly familiar aesthetic of museums constructs a sense of objectivity that naturalises colonial narratives, making them appear objective rather than constructed.

Q. How did you design your installation at Mathaf to challenge the traditional display of Palestinian culture? And how do the pieces featuring tatreez in we refuse_d embody a "living, resistant archive" rather than being 'merely' a display of cultural heritage? 

Shantout: My work aims to undo the colonial process of systematic fragmentation by bringing the story back to the dress and by studying and practicing embroidery as a contemporary, living practice rather than a preserved relic of the past. Since the emphasis on the past when archiving Palestinian embroidery is closely tied to the colonial gaze that perceives the cultural heritage of the colonised merely as a fossil from the past.

In my work, the embroiderer is the cultural keeper, the storyteller, and my teacher. While the embroiderers are completely erased in the ways the thobes are archived and represented within a European ethnographic museum context, for instance. 

Q. You treat tatreez as a "counter-memory." How do you translate intimate, often painful, narratives of displacement into visual embroidery patterns? 

Shantout: In 2019, I began working with my grandmother in Damascus, alongside other women from the city and its suburbs who taught me embroidery through storytelling, showing motifs, books, and their personal collections. To archive the political and socio-economic changes on Palestinian embroidery as a gendered practice in post-war Syria, I first had to have a bodily relation to it—learning its grammar through practice. I was often told that, while the techniques themselves are easy enough to learn, the real challenge lies in the practice of sabr (patience).

The process of hand embroidery is repetitive, slow, and highly intimate. After spending the last few years thinking about and with the practice of Palestinian embroidery, I found a refuge in it when written language failed me, especially after the genocide in Gaza. But embroidery is not only a way to process grief and pain narratives. Before the Nakba, learning embroidery was centred around the festive wedding dresses. Practicing it today is a form of resistance against cultural appropriation; it is a celebration of Palestinian cultural heritage.

Q. How does your work attempt to "unlearn" traditional historical narratives through the labour of embroidery? 

Shantout: The act of stitching in my work becomes a way to question and ‘unlearn’ dominant historical narratives, reframing embroidery as a living archive that is non-linear, personal, and carries the potential for revolutionary contradictions.  

Q. How do you adapt the materials, colours, and techniques of traditional embroidery to document modern political events?  

Shantout: Traditional embroidery continued to shift and evolve after the Nakba, but the NGO-isation of this practice has limited what embroidery looks like today. In Searching for the New Dress, exhibited at we refuse_d, I seek to continue the tradition my grandmother learned at school in Jordan and later practiced and wore as a political statement, while adapting its visual language to reflect contemporary political realities from my position today. For instance, while my grandmother stitches the map of Palestine before the Nakba, I stitch its present-day geographies, mapping the The Map of the Official and unofficial Palestinian Camps in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Palestine. I accompany this piece with a conversation with the philosopher and cultural theorist Sami Khatib on embroidery as a tradition of the oppressed, using mapping and remapping as an artistic method to understand how this tradition persists and shifts under capitalism today.

Regarding materials, I work with those drawn from my fieldwork and, at times, from my own family history, situating the embroidery within lived experience and inherited histories. For instance, I use Etamine fabric, which is commonly used for small-scale embroidery and for learning the practice since the holes in between its threads facilitate the process.

Q. What responsibility do you feel as an artist to ensure that the stories embroidered are not just seen, but heard and acted upon? 

Shantout: Learning Palestinian embroidery comes with a responsibility to speak truth to power, and to work against the depoliticisation of this practice. To do so, I insist on the connection between anti-colonial theory and practice, the story and the community, the motifs and the land.

Read about Nour Shantout’s work at we refuse_d and learn more about the artist herself here. Plan your visit to Mathaf today.

Reem Shaddad is Senior English Digital Editorial Specialist at Qatar Museums.