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.

May 2025

Handwoven Punch Needle Tapestry

In Thread Bare, Kurban explores how queer Arab identity and cultural heritage can be expressed through rug weaving, employing memory, resistance, and sacredness to preserve and elevate marginalized LGBTQ+ narratives. Through the physically intensive and meditative act of large-scale punch-needling, the artist transforms inherited textile practices into a site of queer insurgency—each thread bearing witness to lives that history has tried to erase.

The creation of the monumental tapestry became both a physical ordeal and a spiritual ritual. As the material accumulated, so too did exhaustion: aching shoulders, deepening eye circles, the slow accrual of labor over time. Yet the repetitive act of weaving—deliberate, devotional—became a sanctuary for reflection. Stepping away from a heavily research-driven methodology, Kurban embraced intuition, letting form emerge from within. Symbols surfaced not as premeditated designs, but as votive gestures born of memory and desire.

Thread Bare: Between Looms & Longing, Axelle Kurban,
110 x 180 cm, 2025

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.

Perhaps the most profound moment came not from critics or peers, but from family. In witnessing the work, in speaking of it, pride replaced fear. That shift became its own votive offering—a quiet revolution within a lineage that had long lived in the shadow of silence. Now, with hopes of eventually exhibiting the work in Lebanon, Thread Bare turns toward the queer Arab youth who most need to feel seen, valued, and protected.

Thread Bare: Between Looms & Longing, Axelle Kurban, 2025
Exhibition View, Galerie Au Roi

The Art, Media & Technology class of 2025 at Parsons Paris had the opportunity to exhibit their work at Galerie Au Roi in Paris as part of the group show Vivere. The exhibition brought together diverse practices that explore themes of life, resilience, and transformation through a range of contemporary media.

See Threads of Resistance for more in depth research, concept, prototyping and early ideation.