Harem began as a collaborative project in Beirut in December 2019, bringing together a group of nine women from Syria, Palestine, Iraq, and Lebanon—some skilled in embroidery, others discovering the craft for the first time. The group worked from the home of Zena, a Syrian woman from Aleppo who had resettled in the Badaro district of Beirut following the outbreak of the Syrian civil war in 2011. A devoted mentor and facilitator, Zena created a nurturing space for creative exchange and skill-sharing. She later relocated to France, where the tapestry was eventually completed.

The collaboration was sparked by a visit to The Thief of Baghdad exhibition at Dar El-Nimer in March 2019—a presentation of film posters, press clippings, and photographs from the vast collection of Abboudi Abou Jaoudé. The tapestry draws on these cinematic representations to reflect on the portrayal of Arab men in the Western collective imagination, referencing characters such as Aladdin, Sinbad, Cleopatra, and Scheherazade.

Through a richly imagined cityscape rendered in diverse embroidery techniques, Harem explores themes of masculinity, fantasy, and the invisibility of women in male-dominated spaces. The almost burlesque figure of the powerful, virile man—an archetype of exoticism and strength—is rendered with irony through the delicate, patient hands of the women stitching him into being.

The embroidered city, though fictional, carries fragments of real places: Baghdad, Aleppo, Homs, Daraa, Ramallah—each woman embedding her own story, her own geography, into the threads. The creation of this work spanned over a year, shaped by immense social and personal upheaval—the Lebanese uprising, the COVID-19 pandemic, the devastating Beirut port explosion of August 4th, and Zena’s eventual move to France.

Despite the distance and disruption, the tapestry became a quiet space of resilience and dialogue—a shared fabric of memory, irony, and imagination, evolving stitch by stitch, screen by screen.