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Majd Abdel Hamid (b. 1988) is a Palestinian visual artist from Damascus. In 2010, he graduated from Malmö Art Academy and is currently based between Beirut and Ramallah.
A self-taught embroiderer, Hamid creates small-scale pieces employing humble materials. Conceived as “sculptures in time”, the artist focuses on a laborious and lengthy act of making which empowers him to affront the turbulence of current events. Ranging from monochrome works to geometric abstraction, his colourful embroideries derive from the history of modern art. More figurative motifs such as portraits evoke scenes from documentary news footage reconstituted stitch by stitch as if pixelated. Through his practice, Hamid offers a profound, open-ended reflection on his role as a mediator of social issues.
In Double Sheet (2021) Majd Abdel Hamid is unraveling a bedsheet while listening in the background, to the soundtrack of an interview of Riad al-Turk, extract from a film by Mohamad Ali Al Atassi, Ibn El-Am (2001, Documentary). Majd Abdel Hamid’s work is haunted by the image of the Syrian opposition leader Riad al-Turk who, throughout his 17 years in solitary confinement as a prisoner, executed and destroyed geometric designs on the floor of his cell using lentils picked from his soup – a creative act that reappropriated sense of inner freedom, if only for its maker, and which left no trace.
As part of the exhibition series Matters Of Concern at La Verrière, Fondation D’Enterprise Hermès (FR), his solo A Stitch in Times (2021) displayed meticulous and inherently fragile graphic work which paradoxically arouses resilience in the face of a chaotic and unpredictable world.
