Connecting Threads

The exhibition ‘Connecting Threads’ explores embroidery as a cultural practice, as a vehicle for knowledge and as a medium of collective memory within Afghan diaspora contexts.

The focus is on embroidered textiles, textile objects and narrative fragments that straddle the line between personal experience and cultural archive. The works offer insights into forms of knowledge transmission among women and into textile traditions that take on new meanings in the context of migration.

In Afghanistan, embroidery is far more than merely ornamental design. Patterns, colour compositions and textile techniques have functioned for generations as forms of cultural coding, social belonging and family memory. In the context of exile and the diaspora, these functions shift: textile practices become sites of self-定位, forms of expression for loss and continuity, and media of cultural self-assertion within transnational realities of life.

The exhibition brings together artistic, biographical and cultural-historical perspectives and explores the role of material culture in processes of memory, identity formation and migration. Textile works and personal accounts reveal what is often overlooked in official narratives: the quiet, everyday ways in which cultural belonging is preserved, passed on and redefined.

Curatorial Team

The exhibition is curated by Dr Melanie Krebs and Azita Ibrahimi.

Azita Ibrahimi is an artist and art historian from Herat, Afghanistan, and is currently completing her PhD at the Institute for Central Asian Studies at Humboldt University in Berlin on processes of transformation in Afghan embroidery, particularly in the context of Afghan communities in Germany. Her academic and artistic practice shapes the exhibition in a distinctive way, linking questions of material culture with contemporary debates on diaspora, memory and transcultural aesthetics.

Melanie Krebs is curator of the North Africa, West and Central Asia Department at the Ethnological Museum. Her research focuses on material culture, identity and processes of globalisation, particularly in Central Asia.

Muslim Culture Week 2026

‘Connecting Threads’ is thematically linked to Muslim Culture Week 2026 and can be viewed in the basement of the Dahlem Research Campus.

Opening on 26 September 2026

On the opening day, from 6 pm, the Dahlem Research Campus is also hosting a Central Asian afternoon as part of Muslim Culture Week – featuring a cultural programme, opportunities to meet others and insights into the textile traditions of Central Asia.

• A special exhibition by the Dahlem Research Campus of the Berlin State Museums