Museum of Smuggled Dresses is a research-based project that looks at the representation of Palestinian embroidered dress "thob" in ethnographic museums from a post-colonial perspective and traces the stories of Nour Shantout's grandmother's dresses and the symbols behind her cross-stitched "fallahi" dresses. This fictional museum presents various stories of the embroiderers who taught her how to stitch in post-war Damascus. Following ethnographic aesthetics contradicts what spectators expect to read and what they see.

Nour Shantout is an artist, researcher and educator. She was born in Damascus, Syria, in 1991 and has lived in Vienna since 2015. She received the Helen EL Khal Prize (2014), and her fine arts diploma at the Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien in 2020. She was a visiting lecturer at IZK, Architecture Faculty of the Graz University of Technology (2022-2024), and at the Institute for Transcultural Studies, die Angewandte (2023-2024).

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Muzej pretihotapljenih oblek je raziskovalni projekt, ki s postkolonialne perspektive preučuje reprezentacije palestinskih vezenih oblek, imenovanih »thob«, v etnografskih muzejih, obenem pa sledi zgodbam o oblekah umetničine babice in simbolih na oblekah, imenovanih »fallahi«. Ta fiktivni muzej predstavlja zgodbe vezilj, ki so umetnico v povojnem Damasku naučile šivati. Sledenje etnografski estetiki je v nasprotju s tem, kar gledalci pričakujejo in vidijo.

Nour Shantout je umetnica, raziskovalka in pedagoginja. Rojena je bila leta 1991 v Damasku v Siriji, od leta 2015 živi na Dunaju. Leta 2014 je prejela nagrado Helen EL Khal. Leta 2020 je diplomirala iz likovne umetnosti na Akademiji za likovno umetnost na Dunaju. Bila je gostujoča predavateljica na IZK, Fakulteti za arhitekturo Tehnične univerze v Gradcu (2022-2024), in na Inštitutu za transkulturne študije univerze Angewandte (2023-2024).