Majd Abdel Hamid
Born in Damascus, 1988 and lives in Beirut and Ramallah
Majd Abdel Hamid was born in 1988 in Damascus; he now lives between Beirut and Ramallah, his hometown. He studied at the Palestine Academy of Art from 2007 to 2010 and graduated from the Malmö Academy of Art in 2010.
Majd Abdel Hamid’s work evades questions of format and form. His raw material is time, which is permanently visible in titles that record it and in motion on fabrics that he embroiders. Artistic categories (sewing, sculpture, videos) become obsolete in his work, only experimentation and transformation count. Majd Abdel Hamid observes what happens around him, from the most intimate, daily spaces to the most distant and political territories.
Different ways of looking, of framing and un framing are filtered by both his personal memories (textbooks or objects) and by images from the news found on the internet. The slow, repetitive and performative gesture of embroidery is opposed to the
speed of digital images. The various transgressions of the passing of time give his narratives a more abstract and poetic ‘reality’ of the world.
His solo exhibition A stitch in times was presented in 2021 at La Verrière, Fondation d’Entreprise Hermes in Brussels. His work was also shown in Paris during the exhibition Répare at the Cité des Arts in the same year. The Municipal Museum of Contemporary Art in Ghent, S.M.A.C.K. will present his works in May 2022.
He has taken part in several international residencies and workshops, including “March Project” (Sharjah Art Foundation, 2015), “Former West” (Berlin, Germany, 2013) and “Truth is Concrete” (Granz, Austria, 2012). Hamid worked in residence at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris in 2009. He was a finalist for the Young Artist of the Year Award, presented by the A.M. Qattan Foundation, in 2008, 2010, and 2012.
