Tatreez | Exhibition in the 25th Nidbach Series

Salma Samara’s exhibition revolves around a face-to-face encounter with Israa, a Palestinian embroidery artist based in Jenin, with whom she has collaborated for about a year, without the two having met physically. Their meeting takes place in Nablus, as a military operation is currently underway in Jenin.

The political reality shapes and limits their meeting options: as a Palestinian citizen of Israel, Salma may enter Nablus, while Israa is barred from entering Israel. Thus, geopolitical conditions dictate the nature of their encounter.

Salma drives to Nablus—a city geographically close, yet effectively off-limits to Jewish Israelis, whose entry is prohibited under Israeli law. For most Israeli viewers, a direct meeting with Israa is therefore out of reach, as they cannot cross the border Salma traverses. By documenting the encounter between the two women, the work enables viewers to experience a mediated, indirect encounter with a figure on the other side of the divide.

Salma records the meeting using a 360° camera mounted in her car. The two move together as if enclosed in a private capsule. Their conversation touches on gaps in language and communication, the pervasive anxiety experienced by residents of Jenin due to Israel’s ongoing military operation in the West Bank, and the art of Palestinian embroidery—shared concerns that bind them. While in motion, a dense space of intimacy and alienation emerges between them, where language, fear, and the very materiality of embroidery become entwined.

Israa embroiders as an act of resistance against the erasure of Palestinian culture—a gesture that is also, in many ways, one of preservation, of reviving tradition under oppression. She does so to support herself, despite her family’s disapproval. Salma, by contrast, embeds lines from a poem by Mahmoud Darwish in the embroidery’s imagery. The writing in black ink interferes with the embroidery’s aesthetic and cultural autonomy, producing a charged, nearly violent ​​act of stamping, imprinting tradition itself, thereby underscoring the gap between the desire for preservation and the urge for critical intervention; between oppression—internal, as dictated by tradition, and external, as imposed by occupation—and hope, or the remnants thereof, embodied in Darwish’s verses. The sovereignty of embroidery as an independent aesthetic object is disrupted, reopening to life.

Ironically, the poem—titled “Hope,” from the 1964 collection Awrāq al-Zaytūn (Olive Leaves)—has never been officially translated into English, and is cited here via machine translation, itself derived from a Hebrew machine translation of the original Arabic:

Hope

There is still a remnant of honey on your plates—keep the flies away, so the honey might be spared!

There are still clusters of grapes on your vines—drive off the jackals, vineyard keepers, so the fruit may ripen…

There is still a mat and a door in your houses—bar the wind, that your children may sleep.

The wind is cold and scorching—close the doors…

There is still blood in your hearts—do not spill it, parents, for a new child awaits to be born within you…

There is still firewood in the hearth, and coffee… and a bundle of flame…

Miri Segal