Smuggled Dresses and Displaced Narratives: Artist Talk by Nour Shantout

In this talk, Nour Shantout presents two research-based projects that explore the Palestinian dress as a form of storytelling and resistance. Museum of Smuggled Dresses examines the representation of Palestinian embroidered thobes in ethnographic museums from a post-colonial perspective. Centred around the stories carried in her grandmother’s fallahi dresses, the project interrogates how these dresses are archived, displayed, and often depoliticised within institutional narratives.

The talk also addresses Searching for the New Dress, an ongoing project situated in the Shatila refugee camp in Lebanon. Shantout unpacks the layered research process behind the work and reflects on the ethical and methodological challenges of conducting research in a place that has been over-researched. She considers the limitations and possibilities of artistic research as a method of counter-archiving.