Woven Resistance Textiles by Afghan Refugee Women

This work is about more than economic empowerment. It’s about creating systems rooted in care, where traditional knowledge is honoured, not extracted. Where heritage and modernity are allowed to dance together. Amneh Shaikh-Farooqui

Our current exhibition, Soft Power: Lives told through textile art, has been curated by renowned textile art pioneer, Professor Alice Kettle, with curator of international textiles, Professor Lesley Millar MBE.  

Soft Power features work by 26 contemporary and historic artists who all use textile art as a way to tell stories and communicate life’s journey. 

We caught up with Amneh Shaikh-Farooqui, founder and CEO of Polly and Other Stories, to find out more about her three featured artworks, Eating Culture, Sleepover and The Gift of Giving, which were created in collaboration with Afghan Refugee women and MADE51.

Amneh Shaikh-Farooqui: Woven Resistance: Textiles by Afghan Refugee Women

💬 Working alongside Afghan refugee women in Pakistan has been one of the most humbling and transformative parts of my own journey in the inclusive cultural economy. Through their textiles - each stitch precise, each pattern steeped in memory - I’ve witnessed not just craft, but courage. These women carry histories of displacement, loss, and silencing, yet what they create speaks volumes: of survival, of strength, and of quiet, everyday leadership.

💬 It has been a profound privilege to listen to their stories, to sit with them as they worked, and to help document and preserve the beauty of their skills - heritage skills passed from grandmother to mother to daughter across borders and generations. In spaces where women are so often pushed to the margins, these artisan-led efforts offer not just income, but a kind of soft power: a place to gather, to lead, to be seen.

💬 This work is about more than economic empowerment. It’s about creating systems rooted in care, where traditional knowledge is honoured, not extracted. Where heritage and modernity are allowed to dance together. Where women support women - not as a slogan, but as a daily, deliberate act. These textiles are threads of resistance, yes - but also of hope. And I carry the weight and warmth of that hope with me, every day.

See the pieces for yourself until 10 Aug.