TSA is excited to welcome Palestinian dress historian, researcher, and author Wafa Ghnaim as the keynote speaker for our 2024 Symposium, Shifts and Strands!
The Symposium will take place Nov. 12–17, 2024. It will be hosted on the virtual platform Whova and all events will be held over Zoom. Registered participants can access all Symposium programs anytime during the event and for 90 days afterward. Only registered participants have this privilege, as programs will not be publicly posted. You can register for the Symposium using the link below.
This keynote lecture will be part of the opening plenary on Nov. 12, 2024. A detailed agenda with times and dates for all events will be announced in September.
Wafa Ghnaim Keynote Lecture, Nov. 12, 2024
Messages in Tatreez Motifs: Decoding the Language of Palestinian Embroidery in the Diaspora
“Through Palestinian embroidery and its promotion, we keep a candle in the window” -Leila el Khalidi
Al-Nakba, “the catastrophe” in Arabic, refers to the establishment of Israel in Palestine that ethnically cleansed and forcibly displaced more than 750,000 Palestinians from their ancestral homes, depopulating hundreds of Palestinian villages between late 1947 and early 1949. For Palestinians, al-Nakba remains an ongoing and unrelenting ordeal. In an art historical context, Palestinian dispossession, displacement, and exile significantly changed tatreez (embroidery) and dressmaking traditions. Women found themselves displaced, homeless or widowed–in refugee camps and under utterly different economic and political circumstances–adopting new approaches to dressmaking that carried on the centuries-old tradition of tatreez. The thobe (dress) took on a new meaning, representing a unified Palestinian identity through explicitly nationalistic motifs in the embroidery. Before al-Nakba, the thobe expressed the town, city or village that a woman was from, but now, the tatreez motifs tell the story of Palestinian life beyond borders. In 2021, UNESCO inscribed the art of embroidery in Palestine, encompassing the practices, skills, knowledge, and rituals, on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, recognizing the centuries-old tradition continues to survive against all odds.
About Wafa Ghnaim
Wafa Ghnaim is a Palestinian dress historian, researcher, author and educator who learned embroidery from her mother, award-winning artist Feryal Abbasi-Ghnaim, when she was two years old. In 2017, she founded The Tatreez Institute (Tatreez & Tea), a global arts education initiative teaching Palestinian, Jordanian and Syrian embroidery techniques and dress history. Wafa is the Curator for the Museum of the Palestinian People in Washington, D.C., and a Senior Research Fellow for The Metropolitan Museum of Art in the Antonio Ratti Textile Center and the Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art. Her publications include “Tatreez & Tea: Embroidery and Storytelling in the Palestinian Diaspora” (2018) and “THOBNA: Reclaiming Palestinian Dresses in the Diaspora” (2023). Learn more about her work and forthcoming publications at www.tatreezandtea.com.
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