Frieze magazine has selected Thread Memory: Embroidery from Palestine as one of the top ten exhibitions worldwide for 2025. The exhibition was organised by Hayy Jameel in partnership with the Palestinian Museum and was presented in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
The exhibition was curated by Rachel Dedman. Its trajectory began with Labour of Love, exhibitions she previously curated at Dar El-Nimer in Beirut and at the Palestinian Museum in Birzeit, which formed the initial point of departure for the exhibition before it developed further through collaborations with museums and expanded into international exhibition contexts.
The exhibition features more than 30 Palestinian thobes (dresses) and approximately 100 archival photographs selected from the Palestinian Museum’s permanent collection. Each object carries its own story, reflecting the historical and contemporary continuities of Palestinian embroidery. The exhibition presents embroidery as a living practice accumulated by women across generations, and as an archive of women’s labour and everyday life narratives.
Frieze’s review highlights the exhibition’s strength in its sense of continuity, as embroidery becomes a living record of labour and lineage, and a point of entry for thinking about the history of inherited maternal craft practices and how, and why, this history has been mobilised as a form of resistance within shifting political and cultural contexts.
Thread Memory: Embroidery from Palestine is currently on view in Scotland, as part of a new collaboration between Hayy Jameel, the Palestinian Museum, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. This presentation marks another stage in the exhibition’s cross-border journey and reinforces the presence of Palestinian embroidery at the centre of global conversations on memory, the body, and politics, understood as a living and ongoing practice.
