Textiles are stories, landscapes, memories, even quiet rebellions. Across the Middle East and beyond, artists are pushing this medium into unexpected places: wool becomes architecture, embroidery turns into identity maps, fabric folds grow into mountains. In their hands, threads stop being decorative and start becoming language. Who are these artists? Here are a few you should keep an eye on.

I think of Adrián Pepe as a kind of material alchemist. Honduran-born and Beirut-based, he works deeply with wool, felt, debris, and ritual. One of my favourite works is his solo show A Shroud Is a Cloth in Dubai. He wrapped a 200-square-meter wool façade around a Beirut building damaged in the port explosion, transforming architecture into a textile of memory.

He works with whatever is at hand — scraps, soil, seeds, even leftover yarn — binding them together with felt and collagen, and letting the flaws do the talking. One of his most powerful pieces is Shedding, a performance video where, over 12 hours, wool was wet-felted directly onto his skin, creating a full-body cast that he then peeled away like a cocoon.

Adrián says his practice is about giving materials their voice again — letting wool and waste tell stories about the body, the environment, and repair.

Areen is a Palestinian textile artist now based in Dubai. She studied Textile Design and Art, worked in London and Sweden, and built a practice that blends Levantine embroidery with contemporary design. Her work is all about weaving threads of heritage and asking what tradition means today.

At Dubai Design Week 2023, she presented Flowing Threads — an installation of thousands of unravelling threads in gradient colour, creating a sense of movement and softness.

She is exhibited in Palestine, New York, Paris, Beirut, and Doha, and was shortlisted for the Doha Design Prize. Her practice is a cultural remix — part heritage, part innovation — and every thread is a story about identity.

Also, look at the incredible work, Heavenly Loom, shown at Foundry Downtown as part of the exhibition Next Chapter Edition 01.

Samar Hejazi works across textiles, sculpture, installation, and print. She loves to blur the boundary between what is material and what is perception, often using light, shadow, and reflection to create shifting experiences.

Her solo shows include An Unravelling in Toronto, Geometries of Difference, and Illusions of Separation. In each, the textile is not just fabric — it is a lens. You see one thing, move slightly, and suddenly you see another. Samar’s art is as much about the viewer as the object itself: it changes as you do.

Have you seen what Iranian artist Maryam Ashkanian can do with a pillow? She turns it into a storytelling device. One of my favourite works is her Sleep Series, where embroidered outlines of dreaming figures are stitched onto white pillows — intimate, fragile portraits of people caught between reality and imagination. The series is part textile, part sculpture, part diary of the unconscious.

And then there is the Purge Series — works where fabric is torn, layered, and bound back together. They feel raw, almost like a ritual of release. Threads unravel and overlap, carrying memory, loss, and transformation. It is Maryam showing us how even broken textiles can speak, holding stories we don’t always put into words.

Hana Almilli is a multimedia artist, textile designer, and poet based in Riyadh. With Turkish, Syrian, Kurdish, and Saudi roots, she explores identity through the lens of Al Ghorba — estrangement in a foreign land.

Her work combines weaving, dyeing, embroidery, photography, and poetry. In her first solo show, Sada Kharaet Ghorbati in Oakland, she explored nostalgia and belonging through textile assemblages. She also published her poetry in a book titled Al Ghorba. Hana’s pieces feel intimate and expansive at the same time — threads of memory stitched into form.

One of her projects I really love is Holes in My Abyss (2019). It is all about space, feeling, action, and light. The work deals with loss — the holes and emptiness you feel when someone is gone, or when you feel cut off from others. The fabric is poked through again and again, almost like little wounds, but they also let the light in. It is about how healing happens slowly, how even in sadness, you get those brief flashes of happiness from memories of what is gone.

Leila Seyedzadeh, an Iranian-born artist, takes textiles into the landscape. Her large, folded fabric works look like mountains — soft, monumental, both protective and overwhelming. By layering and shaping cloth, she creates environments you want to walk into, but also stand back and contemplate. Leila is fascinated by how fabric can mimic geography: a fold becomes a slope, a pleat becomes a ridge. Her pieces feel minimal at first, but the more you look, the more you sense the tension between fragility and permanence.