Buthina Abu Milhem combines textile art and embroidery into creations deeply intertwined with the history of the Palestinian embroidery, serving as a precise documentation of her culture and its profound connection to the land.
B. Abu Milhem initially pursued a career as a kindergarten teacher until the 1990s. During this period she developed an interest in art and started taking painting courses under artist Farid Abu Shakra (1963–). During the years 1991–1995, she furthered her artistic education at the Na’amat Art Center, Ar’ara, eventually becoming a senior certified art instructor there. Simultaneously, she continued her work as a kindergarten teacher and held a role in the preschool art centre at the Altfel Al-Arabi association in Ar’ara, which provides training for kindergarten and preschool teachers.
In 2005, B. Abu Milhem marked a milestone with her solo exhibition, The Needle Vanquishes the Tailor, at Umm al-Fahem Art Gallery, curated by F. Abu Shakra. This consisted of three dresses composed with fragments of her grandmother’s traditional dresses, with pins and needles inserted into the fabric and black, green and red threads woven from them. She uses the woven threads as brushes, colours, and drawing, expressing her anguish over the loss of culture and identity.

B. Abu Milhem uses Palestinian embroidery from different geographic localities. These dresses, deprived of their role as clothes and transformed into art pieces, evoke a sense of place or history for the viewer, engaging with them in a different way beyond their practical use as garments. Instead of lines in a sketch, the threads are players of an important role in B. Abu Milhem’s dresses. These pieces are composed with drawing pins, needles and stitches, folded in a special way and sprinkled with written words, long threads and short threads – an example of this method being her series The Needle Vanquishes the Tailor (2005–2018). In this series the dress becomes a canvas for personal memories and experiences, serving as a reflection on her culture’s historical and political narratives. B. Abu Milhem’s artistic journey encompasses both individual expression and a profound connection to the broader context of Arab culture and its complexities.

B. Abu Milhem’s artistic creations carry profound connotations and symbols interconnecting the dress and the body as a unit. In her artworks, the dress embodies a yearning for the past and ancestral roots, symbolising women, the body, the land and continuity, including fertility. Through the symbolic division of cloth resembling a geographical map, she portrays global borders, marked with painful staples, embodying the collective human experience of conflict. As in her work On the Table, 2014. B. Abu Milhem’s art transcends mere aesthetics, encapsulating a deep narrative that resonates with cultural, historical and identity struggles.

Notable amongst her numerous group exhibitions is the 2008 showcase in Correspondence: Contemporary Arab Artists at the Museum for Islamic Art, Jerusalem. Her works are part of international collections such as the Israel Museum, Jerusalem and the Museum Beelden aan Zee, The Hague.