Nour Shantout: Weaving Narratives Through Embroidery

Artist and researcher, Nour Shantout’s work showcased at “Ruins, Derelicts & Erasure” at VCUarts Qatar Gallery is a testament to the power of craft as a means of resistance, documentation, and reclamation. The exhibtion is curated by curated by Meriem Aiouna and Dina Alkhateeb of VCUarts Qatar,

Through embroidery, Nour reconfigures personal and collective histories, offering an alternative narrative that defies erasure. In a world that often silences marginalised voices, her art speaks with unwavering clarity, weaving together past, present, and future in meticulous stitches.

Nour is an artist, researcher, and educator living currently between two contradictions in Vienna, where she has lived since 2015. While she built a strong, supportive personal community that nurtures her creativity, her professional space remains a challenging environment where she faces censorship and silencing. Despite her work being valued, the very institutions that showcase her work are often silent about the genocide in Palestine and issues around colonialism.

In this candid conversation with SCALE, Nour reflects on her journey, her artistic practice, and how embroidery has become a medium of storytelling, resistance, and preservation of history.

“I went to this University in Vienna and was accepted there because of my interest in anticolonial theory, and now I am fired, and my doctorate funding is held back, all because of the same anticolonial work and because I was speaking up about Palestine,” says Nour.

SCALE: Nour, could you tell us about your early influences? What shaped your interest in art and activism?

Nour Shantout: I grew up in Damascus in a family deeply engaged with culture and politics. My childhood was rich with conversations about the countries I belonged to, Syria, Palestine peppered with literature, art and history of both these countries. I learnt hundreds of poems from my grandfather  who could recite them by heart. Our home was a space for intellectuals, authors, and thinkers. At the same time, it was also challenging because my family—especially my Palestinian mother’s side—was political. I was acutely aware of the reality around me, living under a dictatorial regime.

Damascus, with its extraordinary cultural heritage, shaped my artistic practice. The city has a deep tradition of textile making, which has remained an integral part of my work. However, my formal education in Lebanon and France was largely rooted in Western traditions. Today, my art is about unlearning that framework and reconnecting with my own cultural wealth.

SCALE: Your work explores embroidery as an archive of personal and collective histories. How did this medium become central to your practice?

Nour: I started working with embroidery after a difficult visit to Syria in 2019, where I witnessed the destruction of places I knew. I began reconnecting with my grandmother’s craft, learning embroidery from her. It became a way to process my emotions and to document what was happening to the places and people I loved.It all began when my grand mother send me her thobe that induced my thoughts into the stories behind it.

Embroidery isn’t just a craft; it’s a historical document. Women from different places in Palestine met in singular refugee camps, inspiring each other’s practices. Due to their economic conditions and displacement, the fabric of their dresses changed—traditional fabrics were replaced with factory-manufactured materials, cheaper threads were used, and colours shifted. This led to the emergence of the ‘New dress’ or the ‘Camp Dress’, the topic of my PhD thesis. Historians largely ignored these transformations. Even Widad Kawar, a well-known collector of Palestinian dresses, overlooked these evolving garments for many years. This intrigued me because these dresses reflect the political conditions surrounding the embroiderers.

SCALE: Can you tell us about your project “Searching for the New Dress” which is shown at VCUarts Qatar?

Nour: This research-based project examines Palestinian embroidery in Shatila, a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon. I was interested in how the migration of Syrian, Syrian-Palestinian, and Palestinian women influenced embroidery traditions. I conducted interviews with embroiderers in various centers in Shatila, asking how their experiences and displacement affected their work.

I wondered: What would a ‘New Dress’ look like after the destruction of the Yarmouk camp—the capital of the Palestinian diaspora—and after waves of migration? Which fabrics, colours, and threads would be used? What political slogans or maps would be embedded in the designs? Through this research, I developed new motifs and stitches that merge Syrian and Palestinian embroidery traditions.

One part of the project involves a map embroidered on a dress, illustrating the military influence before Yarmouk’s destruction. Each colour on the map originally represented an armed group, but I removed those colours after reflecting on their implications. Instead, I embroidered a text from an interview with a woman named Hudal, an embroiderer who survived the siege of Yarmouk. She continued embroidering under the most extreme conditions, sourcing threads from abandoned embroidery centers and buying fabric through a makeshift underground economy. This dress, therefore, is more than an artwork—it is an act of counter-mapping, questioning dominant narratives and centering the lived experiences of displaced people.

SCALE: Your latest series, “Love Poems”, connects Palestinian embroidery to global indigenous struggles. What inspired this project?

Nour: “Love Poems” emerged after a period of reflection on my artistic practice.I needed time to grieve the genocide in Palestine that the world was witnessing and could do nothing about. I stopped producing artwork for a while, questioning what kind of format would be meaningful. This series connects Palestinian embroidery with indigenous anti-colonial traditions worldwide, exploring shared struggles for land and sovereignty.

One piece in the series, “Ask the Cypress Trees”, which is showcased at the VCUarts Gallery space incorporates a text from the “Indigenous Antifuturist Manifesto”, which I read in 2020. The text states, “‘Dear colonizer, your future is over. — An ancestor.” This manifesto, published during the COVID-19 pandemic, challenges the colonial control of imagination and invites us to envision a world without oppression.

Colonisation has tried to make us believe that having a relationship with the land is impossible. Through this work, I explore how textile practices can reclaim these connections, linking past and future through craft.

SCALE: What role does memory play in your work?

Nour: Memory is central to my practice. One of my works includes a textile piece from my mother’s closet. She hadn’t returned to that closet for years, and it seemed to me as if that fabric had been waiting to be acknowledged.

Embroidery is deeply personal and yet inherently political. It carries the struggles, resilience, and adaptability of generations of women. My work is about preserving these stories while reimagining their place in today’s world.

SCALE: What’s next for you?

Nour: I will continue to explore embroidery as a method of counter-mapping and storytelling. My goal is to challenge dominant narratives and highlight the role of women in preserving and transforming cultural heritage.

At the same time, I am thinking about different artistic formats that can address urgent issues. I want my work to remain dynamic—responding to political realities while staying rooted in collective memory.

Images Courtesy: VCUarts Qatar