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Event begins at 12:00 Noon US EST; 7:00 PM Palestine time.
Nour Shantout
Nour will talk about her research-based project “Museum of Smuggled Dresses”, as well as her recent project “Searching for the New Dress”.
“Museum of Smuggled Dresses” looks at the representation of Palestinian embroidered dresses “thobes” in ethnographic museums from a post-colonial perspective, and traces the stories of her grandmother’s dresses, and the symbols behind her cross stitched “fallahi” dresses. It is a fictional museum which presents various stories of the embroiderers who taught her how to stitch in post-war Damascus. She Follows ethnographic aesthetics, and creates a contradiction between what spectators expect to read and what they see. Furthermore, a counter-narrative method plays a fundamental role in unravelling knowledge production and historicizing in such sites.
“Searching for the New Dress” looks at Palestinian embroidery in Shatila, a Palestinian camp in Lebanon. It explores how embroidery is influenced by the migration of Syrian Palestinian and Syrian women who took refuge there after the war in Syria. To create ‘New Dresses’ that reflect the socio-political, economic and demographic changes in the embroiderer's life in the aftermath of the Syrian revolution, she will learn to design new motifs and types of stitches which are usually associated with Syrian embroidery. The research also involves interviews with embroiderers in various embroidery centers in Shatila, identifying designs that reflect the changes in Palestinian embroidery. The project asks, what if a ‘New Dress’ emerges after the Syrian revolution, the destruction of the Yarmouk camp – the capital of the Palestinian diaspora –, and the displacement of thousands of Syrians? How would it look like? Which fabric, colors, threads and techniques would be used? Which political slogans and maps would it have?
About Nour Shantout
Nour Shantout, was born in Damascus, Syria in 1991, is based in Vienna since 2015. She started studying art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Damascus in 2009 and continued her work abroad. She received her bachelor of art in 2014 at The Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts, the Helen EL Khal prize (2014), and pursued her studies at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. She received her diploma of fine arts at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste Wien (Textual Sculpture, Prof. Heimo Zobernig) in 2020, and she is currently pursuing her PhD in Philosophy at the same academy.
She works around subjugated heritage, counter-memory, counter-history, labor and alienation, from a post-colonial feminist perspective. She is interested in questioning the overly familiar aesthetics of museums as "heterotopias" and "learning" sites.