IMAGE DETAILS

Chechaouen arid (wall hanging), Morocco, early 17th century. Polychrome silk embroidery on linen

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09 July 2010

‘A Story of Islamic Embroidery’ under the patronage of Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed al Nayhan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, opened at Gallery One in the Gulf state’s Kempinski Emirates Palace Hotel, on 6 April 2010. It brings together more than two hundred exceptional textiles that take visitors on a cultural and poetic journey to the Silk Road and North Africa and beyond, exploring the embroidery tradition in urban, rural and nomadic settings.

Presented as the first of a kind in the Gulf region, ‘A Story of Islamic Embroidery in Nomadic and Urban Traditions’, focuses primarily on needlework from Central and South Asia, Iran, and the Maghreb. The exhibition is the fulfilment of a long running initiative to advance appreciation of the little-known world of embroidery from the world of Islam, with a special emphasis on teaching visitors about the anonymous embroiderers, predominantly female, involved in their creation.

The world of women’s craft is fascinating but often hidden, with most work carried out in the discreet intimacy of the home. But needlework offers a rare window into the minds and lives of these anonymous embroiderers. Because a woman’s efforts, emotions and ambitions lie behind it, each piece carries some testimony of the lives of Islamic women in their enclosed, domestic world.

The many roles played by embroidered textiles in urban and rural traditions are best understood by means of elements of continuity in design, technique and ritual usage. And beyond its direct material function, every piece is imbued with a certain poetry. All textiles are rich in meaning, and because each is both a story in itself and part of a bigger, more complex picture, there is more than one way to admire and comprehend them. Accordingly, the exhibition is arranged to reflect the links, intersections and divisions between every embroidered item.

To make these historical and cultural links easier to grasp, the embroideries are ordered around two axes. The first is by region and the communities in which the textiles were made, showing how each embroidery is shaped by, and reveals, its cultural setting. In Central Asia, for instance with its relatively less formal social and political hierarchies, even sophisticated commercial textile processes involved input from independent skilled tradesmen at many different stages, making the process closer to a dialogue between craftsmen than factory production. By contrast, Rasht embroideries from northern Iran provide ample evidence of a closely controlled production process with clear divisions of power and responsibility.

The second axis follows the theme of embroidery in rural and urban settings. Examples made by nomadic communities in Central Asia tend to be inspired by nature in their decoration. They are alive with more or less abstracted symbols representing the animals, such as scorpions and rams, that the wandering tribes encounter in their daily lives. By the same token, urban textiles present us with designs geared towards the more ordered world of the city garden with their beautiful floral patterns.

Reflecting the cultural diversity of the region, Central Asian embroidery combines great variety with an impression of unity and continuity. We can admire the different traditional patterns and styles, see how these were related to the different arenas for which the textiles were intended – commerce or home – as well as the different functions of embroideries in ritual and society.

The exhibition includes a selection of the various embroidered trappings made by Lakai and Kungrat Uzbek tribes, notably richly stitched horse’s saddle cloths, known as da-our (3), and uuk kap ilgich and torba ilgich tent hangings and containers. These highly abstract but richly symbolic embroideries are a display of ancestral wealth and power. The pieces on show present a narrative that takes us from the acquisition of raw materials through trade to the spinning and dyeing of local materials, then to the question of gender division of labour within the tent. Their designs and patterns also testify to the role of Islam as the tie that binds together ancient and modern traditions. The display of all these textiles allows for the comparison and technical analysis of the raw materials, dyestuffs, weaving techniques and embroidery stitches.

A section devoted to the Turkic tribes of Central Asia shows how their sophisticated textiles were adapted to the nomadic lifestyle, as they could be folded, loaded onto a camel, and taken to the next camp. Women, seen as the preservers of community traditions, carried luxurious costumes thought to have protective talismanic properties. The collection explores this magical property attributed to embroidery in items such as the women’s faux-sleeved head-robes known as chyrpy (white [4], yellow and dark blue), in children’s elek, and in the many complex ways embroidery was used to decorate a huge variety of garments.

In the section dedicated to embroidery in an urban setting, a group of Uzbek suzanis, the large embroidered dowry hangings typical of certain Central Asian towns and cities, present a distinctly urban architectural framework akin to wall paintings, depicting a predictable universe of beauty, symmetry and order, rules that follow the universal style of Islamic art.

The pursuit of urban embroideries also takes us to Morocco, where a synthesis of external and internal influences has created patterns typical of urban Morocco while retaining the original imprint of Muslim Spain. Each textile is thus the result of the contrasting influence of classical Islamic art, known for its interlacing and interpenetrating patterns, and the rectilinear and vigorously geometric art of the Berber tribes. Algeria was an Ottoman province for three centuries, with the result that the ancient Berber city of Algiers received from the Levant a new style of designs for its handicrafts. Algerian women were particularly well-known for their tanchifa, reversible scarves with flower patterns influenced by the Turkish repertoire of carnations, hyacinths, tulips and eglantines.

Exceptional pieces of South Asian needlework include Hazara phulkari from Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province, as well as Kohistani and Pashtun embroideries, and pieces from the Swat Valley. Translated as ‘flower work’, the Hazara phulkari belongs to a local embroidery tradition practiced by all of the region’s diverse groups, Muslims, Hindus or Sikhs, albeit with varying motifs and colouring. Kohistani garments decorated with coins and dismantled zippers add an air of eccentricity, while related Swati embroideries are worked in silk thread on black cotton grounds with red as the main colour. From the Pashtun groups in the southern regions of Afghanistan come elaborate costumes of silk, with applied beadwork and ornamental jewellery.

For contrast and comparison, the final section displays seven embroideries made in the late 19th or early 20th century in the northern Iran city of Rasht: these are plainly commercial, urban products, mainly worked by men for trade.

The embroideries are displayed to allow visitors to admire and ‘question’ them. Beyond their technical and aesthetic aspects, one is invited to wonder about the lives hidden behind each cloth, to imagine who might have cried on this pillow or prayed on that mat. The aim of the exhibition is either to open a window on a different culture, or on a different period of one’s own culture. Every stitch, shade and pattern involves the viewer in an intimate relationship with that secret history and culture. With a display of culturally-loaded embroidered textiles as the medium, this exhibition, designed by Colin Morris, aims to provide its audience with some of the key conceptual knowledge essential for a better understanding of people from a different time or place, believing that this will, in turn, encourage a raised level of curiosity, tolerance and acceptance in a world of too many conflicts.

In recent years Abu Dhabi has begun to open its doors to the world of art, becoming a major art centre in the process. So when the idea of exhibiting Islamic embroideries arose, the city seemed the most appropriate place for such an endeavour. With the opening of new grand museums and through world-class exhibitions, the UAE has proven the importance of art both as an ambassador for beauty and as a way to link people over and beyond national and cultural boundaries.

And where better in the world than the Middle East to host an exhibition of these outstanding examples of Islamic applied art? Arab civilisation is an inheritor and producer of astounding cultural treasures, many of which remain relatively little known to many in the region. Embroidery can be used to reveal the wealth of the heritage of Islamic art. Our ‘shrinking world’ is hungry for fresh beauties and is eager to understand civilisations that less than a century ago seemed so far and remote. The exhibition is thus designed as a poetic journey in time, where every stitch brings the visitor closer to the intimate world of the embroiderers.

This unprecedented presentation would not have been possible without the support of the AMBA Foundation which appreciates the urgency of conserving and sharing these beautiful yet relatively unknown textiles with the world. The Foundation, based in Switzerland, is an anonymous private family-owned entity that began collecting textiles some twenty years ago, and now wish to share the result of their passion more widely.

Isabelle Denamur, curator of ‘A Story of Islamic Embroidery in Nomadic and Urban Traditions’ and consultant to the AMBA Foundation, is an ethnologist and author of Moroccan Textile Embroidery (2003). The exhibition at Gallery One, Emirates Palace Hotel, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, ends 28 July 2010 and is accompanied by a 376 page illustrated catalogue, A Story of Islamic Embroidery in Nomadic and Urban Traditions, co-authored by Isabelle Denamur (assisted by Charlotte Kingsman), Andrew Hale, Kate Fitz Gibbon and Marie France Vivier. www.artsabudhabi.ae, isabelle.denamur@gmail.com