MA Forum in collaboration with LIO: Nour Shantout

In this artist talk, Nour Shantout will present Searching for the New Dress, an ongoing artistic research project that looks at Palestinian embroidery in Shatila, a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon. Welcome!

Nour Shantout’s project Searching for the New Dress explores how embroidery has been influenced by the migration of Syrian-Palestinian and Syrian women who took refuge in Lebanon following the 2011 revolution and the subsequent war in Syria.

She will unravel the different layers of the research process, reflecting on what refusal looks like in practice. Drawing on feminist and Indigenous methodologies, she positions artistic research as a space of unlearning, where learning to unlearn becomes both a method and a necessity.

Nour Shantout is an artist, researcher, and educator, born in Damascus and based in Vienna since 2015. Her work centres on themes of subjugated heritage, counter-memory and history, labour, and alienation, approached from a postcolonial feminist perspective. It is situated in continuity with the political application of Palestinian embroidery, a practice that emerged from the struggle for Palestinian liberation.

Nour Shantout, The Yarmouk Camp Dress, From Searching for the New Dress. Photo: Leonhard Hilzensauer. 


MA Forum is a public seminar series on artistic research, hosted by HDK-Valand in collaboration with L’Internationale Online. Through invited guests, the series explores different dimensions of artistic research.

More info here.

Related activities

Related contributions and publications