Local Embroidery

The exhibition "Tiraz: Local Embroidery – Woman / Memory / Identity" at the Museum for Islamic Art was an inspiration for Jewelry and Fashion Design students at Jerusalem's Bezalel Academy of Art and Design. In 2015, second- and third-year students in the Bezalel course on Ethnologically Inspired Fashion Design studied Islamic culture in the first semester, and later traditional Palestinian embroidery. After their visit to the museum, the students were assigned their final course project: to design clothing that could be related to the Palestinian dresses, using contemporary techniques, original adaptations, or development of fabrics that merge old traditions with innovation. This new exhibition presents the collection they created.

The students were given an entirely free hand in the project. Each indulged his or her personal taste in fashion, and used the associations aroused in viewing the exhibition to create his or her own contemporary interpretation of the heritage and content they had seen. The students decided how to develop the shape, the texture, the techniques and the colors of a contemporary collection that preserves within it a rich but culturally sensitive source.

The students chose a wide variety of techniques for their collections, among them developing embroidery with a 3D printer; laser-cutting colored Plexiglas into shapes inspired by the world of embroidery and embroidered decorations; laser-cutting leather into forms suggested by Islamic architecture; embroidery using silver chains; and a silkscreen print of authentic embroidery as the flattening out and deconstruction of memory.  

The original exhibition evoked a range of subjects that the students opted to tackle: prayer and trance, family roots, modern Tel Aviv and old-world Jaffa, memory and the deconstruction of memory, progress and tradition.

“My research begins in a personal place. When I was exposed to the subject and to the exhibition, I couldn’t ignore the impressive, tireless craftsmanship of the Palestinian women. Most of them did this kind of work as part of the Palestinian tradition from an early age. The embroidery has different but constant forms, and the colors don’t change either, just like many things in the women’s lives that don’t change."

When I think of the map of life, I mostly see choice and freedom. Therefore I found my inspiration in the subway maps of New York and Paris, two cities in which I feel especially free. The choice of subway trains symbolizes the incredible ease with which you can get from one place to another in big cities.

The absolute freedom and the feeling that you have the whole world in the palm of your hand are placed in contrast to Palestinian embroidery, hence the use of images from the world of subway trains together with embroidery patterns.”

Ruhama Kazaz, 4th Year                                                                                                 

Project: “This Way”