In Narrative Threads, Sary Zananiri’s Performing Self, Performing Other interrogates the construction of authenticity, class and gender in Mandate-era Palestine through the reworking of archival studio portraits. Drawing from family collections, the series centres on photographs of urban Palestinians who temporarily adopted “traditional” dress as a performative assertion of national belonging during a period of political upheaval.

By digitally manipulating and pixelating these images, Zananiri disrupts easy nostalgia and challenges Orientalist readings that treat such portraits as transparent documents of the past. Referencing the altered tesserae of Late Antique mosaics, the work connects photographic erasure to longer histories of reinterpretation and misattribution in the region. Within the book’s broader exploration of embroidery in contemporary art, Zananiri’s series positions tatreez as an enacted and contested symbol — less a static marker of heritage than a charged site where modern Palestinian identity was actively staged and negotiated.