Thread Bare: Between Looms & Longing

Punch needle tapestry exploring queer Arab identity through insurgent memory, sacred symbolism, and ancestral craft, transforming traditional textile practices into acts of resistance, reclamation, and queer futurity.

These ex-votos, central to the work, are not relics of tradition but living rituals—queer sanctuaries embedded within the fabric. Some draw from ancestral signs, others are newly imagined, carved into the cloth as constellations of remembrance and resistance. They honor lives and lineages often rendered invisible, reclaiming cultural space through the sacred act of making. In Kurban’s hands, rug weaving becomes more than craft—it is an embodied archive, a poetics of insurgent memory.

This work interrogates the intersection of queer identity, Arab heritage, and textile art, drawing from queer theory, Middle Eastern art history, and textile studies. It situates itself within a lineage of queer Arab artists who reclaim cultural memory through traditional practices, challenging the colonial gaze and Western narratives that have long marginalized MENA voices. Kurban’s practice queers the sacred archive, not only preserving but transforming it—offering a future woven with resilience, visibility, and love.

At its core, Thread Bare is a bridge between past and present, a tapestry of grief and joy, mourning and celebration. Through the integration of a zine—a low-cost, anti-institutional format rooted in community knowledge-sharing—Kurban extends the work beyond the white cube, embedding it into the same radical lineage of resistance from which it draws.