MultakaOxford Artweeks Display: Living Textiles
Saturday 16 May - Monday 25 May (During opening hours)
Old Library
Encounter the beauty and profound cultural importance that the art of textiles holds for people around the world. This display, facilitated by MultakaOxford at the Pitt Rivers Museum, celebrates how communities around the world use textiles and creativity to weave stories of resilience, beauty and cultural identity.
Pieces from the following project partners included in the display:
Alsama Studio
Embroidered pieces from their recent exhibition Threading Memory: Tatreez Transformations. Co-curated with the women artists of Alsama Studio, a grassroots social enterprise working across Beirut's Shatila refugee camp and Idlib, Syria, their display presents an exploration of tatreez - the traditional embroidery practice of the Levant - and its reimagining in contexts of exile, migration and creative renewal. It invites visitors to engage with tatreez as both a material art form and a living practice of cultural memory.
To learn more about Alsama, click here.
The Yemen Noor Foundation (YENOF) and Improving Lives through Cultural Initiatives (IL-CI)
A selection of hand-embroidered wall pieces that were created as part of a project dedicated to preserving Yemen's embroidery heritage in collaboration with YENOF and IL-CI, made by embroiderers from YENOF's embroidery programme. YENOF was established in 2013 to support women from low-income households - enabling them to contribute to family income and fund their children's education - the programme has since expanded to include a younger generation. Today, it also welcomes the educated daughters of its original participants, many of whom are actively engaging with and sustaining their country's embroidery heritage.
To learn more about YENOF, click here.
The Tatreez Collective
The Tatreez Collective is a cultural organisation that preserves Palestinian heritage through educational workshops, co-creation and ethical fashion.
The Tatreez Forest: Stitching Palestinian Heritage is a community project co-developed by The Tatreez Collective and the Arab British Centre. The large scale tatreez panels depicting cypress trees - a powerful symbol of hope and resilience in Palestinian culture - are a compilation of pieces stitched by people from 15 different countries, created either at museum-based workshops or contributed through a worldwide digital call-out. The Tatreez Forest is more than a display of textiles. It is a living archive of community engagement, cultural preservation and collective storytelling.
To learn more about The Tatreez Collective, click here.
Artweeks Events and Workshops
As part of this Oxford Artweeks display, we are hosting three research space sessions to explore the Museum's textile collection from Syria, Palestine and Yemen. The sessions are a behind-the-scenes opportunity to meet the 'Clothworkers' textile team and see pieces from the collections that aren't usually on display or seen by the public.
The sessions are free but booking is essential due to limited spaces.
Please note each session will be the same content, displaying the same objects.
Saturday 16 May (Booking links coming soon)
Session 1: 11.00 - 12.00
Session 2: 14.00 - 15.00
Thursday 21 May
Session 3: 14.00 - 15.00
