Talking Tatreez with Wafa Ghnaim and Rachel Dedman

This in-person event brings together Wafa Ghnaim and Rachel Dedman, two specialists of tatreez and Palestinian material culture, to talk about the history and contemporary life of the craft. 

Wafa Ghnaim learned Palestinian embroidery from her mother, award-winning artist Feryal Abbasi-Ghnaim, as a young girl. This early training – with each stitch carrying her mother’s memories and the history of life in Palestine before 1948 – shaped Wafa’s entry into the field of dress history. In 2016 she founded the Tatreez Institute, and during a recent fellowship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art she expanded her work to the study of headdresses from the ancient to the contemporary period. In this presentation, Wafa will share the trajectory of this research and her approach to preserving Palestinian intangible cultural heritage in the United States.

Rachel Dedman is the Jameel Curator of Contemporary Art from the Middle East at the V&A. She has been working on Palestinian dress for more than a decade, beginning as curator for the Palestinian Museum in Birzeit, West Bank. She is the curator of numerous exhibitions on tatreez, including across the V&A’s family of sites, and cares for the museum’s collection of Palestinian dress. Rachel will share some recent research on the history of tatreez and textiles of Gaza, reflecting on the creative legacies of Gazan embroiderers and weavers, as well as on the destruction and safeguarding of cultural heritage in the present. 

The event is organised in celebration of the V&A’s current Tatreez display at V&A South Kensington and the Thread Memory: Embroidery from Palestine exhibition at V&A Dundee, both curated by Rachel. Wafa is a commissioned designer developing children’s resources for Thread Memory. The two will also be speaking at V&A Dundee on 28 November. 

Part of the V&A's Jameel Programme