Ensemble

Nour Shantout is a Syrian-Palestinian artist, researcher, and educator whose multidisciplinary practice spans embroidery, installation, text, and collaborative methods. Grounded in a deep engagement with Palestinian embroidery (tatreez), her work treats this traditional craft not merely as heritage, but as a living, resistant archive, one that embodies identity, counter-memory, and intergenerational knowledge.

Her research-based projects trace intimate personal narratives and collective histories, particularly within contexts of displacement and marginalization, such as the Shatila refugee camp in Lebanon. In Searching for the New Dress, Shantout reflects on the transmission of memory and the circulation of embroidered dresses between generations of women in exile, revealing how garments become vessels of everyday survival, counter-mapping, and cultural resilience.

From a postcolonial feminist perspective, Shantout examines the aesthetics of ethnographic display and the structures of institutional knowledge production. She questions how histories are told, who tells them, and through which media. Through layered narrative methodologies and community-based workshops, she cultivates alternative forms of archiving that are grounded in lived experience, embodied practices, and radical care.

Evidence responds to intensified censorship through the emergence of new visual codes. Artists and cultural workers often blur faces in online documentation—a protective gesture that transforms pixelated squares into subtle symbols of an era marked by constraint. This work reflects on the evolving relationship between language, medium, and temporality. As screenshots of social media posts are used to silence or undermine cultural voices, the exhibition space shifts from a mere site of display to one of negotiation, risk, and resistance. It invites us to consider how acts of refusal—of revealing less, of withholding faces—can paradoxically assert presence and agency.

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we refuse_d is produced by Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, on the occasion of their 15th anniversary, and presented in partnership with M HKA.
Curated by Nadia Radwan and Vasıf Kortun.