Nour Shantout

She Is Not an Ordinary Worker (from ‘Searching for the New Dress‘)

Handbestickte Baumwolle auf Baumwolle

35cm x 25cm (ohne Holzleiste) / 35cm x 35cm (mit Holzleiste)

2022

 

Whenever a revolution happens, I have mixed feelings, a duality of joy and grief. But then I remember that under patriarchy and colonialism we are constantly living in an endless state of mourning and defeat. Embroidery on the other hand functions as the archive of the past defeats, that insists on the presence of the ‘now-time Jetztzeit’. Walter Benjamin tells us that revolutions happen in these moments of immediacy. This is when embroidery as a ‘tradition of the oppressed’ emerges in the front lines, and my Iranian friend told me once that embroidery changes our perception of time, time becomes a motif; a flower or a slogan, challenging our capitalist perception of time. 

I am using this feminist strategy like many generations did before me in an ongoing protest against the occupation in Palestine. I stitched some flowers that women stitched on their dresses next to the Palestinian flag when they were not allowed to raise it in the first Intifada in 1987, together with a slogan ‘ژن، ژیان، ئازادی’ (woman, Life, freedom) which is chanted globally in solidarity with Iranian woman, and we should not forget that it was coined by our Kurdish sisters in the early 2000’s. Our struggles are intertwined, solidarity is the practice of unravelling the colonial unknowing, and our liberation only comes from this realisation.

 

*Preis inkl. Steuer, exkl. Rahmen

My work focuses on subjugated heritage, counter-memory, counter-history, labor and alienation, from a post-colonial feminist perspective. I am interested in questioning the overly familiar aesthetics of museums as ‘heterotopias’ and learning sites. With the intention of doing so, I developed a specific way of creating my work through multiple layers, this includes research, field-work and learning -to unlearn- as a decolonial practice. After the Syrian revolution, I left my hometown Damascus. In the time since, I have lived in Beirut, Paris and Vienna. These three cities have specific art (making) traditions, challenges, and problems which interested me and it left an enormous impact on the way I think of political art-work and the aesthetics of politics. A significant part of my practice is undertaken in challenging geopolitical zones. For instance, I work as an artist and researcher in what are already over-researched places – such as Shatila, or in post-war Damascus and its suburbs. It is very difficult work that lends itself to tensions between myself and the participants, and I am sensitive to the lack of trust in the communities I seek to engage with. My work does not aim to overcome this tension, but to engage it. As such, I use Indigenous methodologies, such as narrative methodology, which aim to reinforce earning the participant's trust by facilitating the sharing of my own experiences and stories of Palestinian embroidery transmitted through my family via my grandmother.

Nour Shantout

ARTCARE - Rechte Bahngasse 30-32 | 1030 Wien

Work	#2244
Anfangsdatum	26/09/2024 09:37
Enddatum	30/06/2025 10:56
Aktueller Preis	2.830 €
Total fällig	2.830 €