Majd Abdel Hamid
Safe Space
2023 -
cotton and silk thread on silk and cotton fabric + cotton thread on cotton fabric
18 x 14 cm + 42.8 x 18 cm. Unique
This diptych is part of a series of works combined in one corpus in conversation with the artist. While each piece stems from a different series, they all revolve around the notion of being in and around Beirut during its most recent tumultuous past.
Initiated in 2022, Safe Space emerges from Majd Abdel Hamid’s inquiry into personal safe space amidst crises. Friends were invited to draw a map of what they deemed a safe place. Abdel Hamid intricately transposes these maps onto fabric using cotton and synthetic threads. This transformation from blueprints to tangible artworks began as a collaborative endeavour, suspended momentarily in early 2023 due to the earthquake that hit the region in Turkey and Syria — and seemingly never-ending aftershocks. The aftermath propelled Abdel Hamid into a deeper exploration of physical and psychological safety within his own lived spaces, and led him to realise that the notion of safety is temporal, impossible to maintain. An evolving narrative embroidered on cut metal from strainers, this project weaves together communal and personal definitions of safety.
“This work is an attempt at reclaiming a practice. I want to reconcile a relationship with a city and claim a small repair space: not as a reaction to disasters but as a continuum of interaction, openness, and reflection. The practice of embroidery as a responsive medium is fragile and borderline neurotic.”
Reference MA-ISO-2023-A
About the artist
Born in Damascus 1988
Works and Lives in Between Beirut and Ramallah
Majd Abdel Hamid is a visual artist from Palestine. He was born in Damascus in 1988, and is currently based between Beirut and Ramallah. He graduated from Malmö Art Academy, Sweden (2010) and attended the International Academy of Art in Palestine (2007-2009).
He works in a broad variety of media, including video, installation, drawing and sculpture, through which he explores themes of national identity and trauma. His artistic practice is rooted in the slow, repetitive, performative gesture, including embroidery and cross-stich on fabric supports, as a counterbalance to high-speed digital image production and pixels.
“Palestinian artist Majd Abdel Hamid works chiefly through the medium of small-scale, often abstract and colorful embroideries, employing simple, humble materials worked with great delicacy. As a self-taught embroiderer, Hamid’s works are the fruit of a slow, laborious act of making, conceived as “sculptures in time” rather than demonstrations of virtuosic skill.
The hand-stitched works are artisanal, even amateur in feel. Each is a record of its own imperfections, hesitations, and omissions that leaves visible the raw fabric of the support. The motifs – often unfinished – seem to derive from the history of modern art, from monochrome works to geometric abstraction and expressionism. Occasionally, figurative motifs evoke scenes from documentary news footage, or portraits – reconstituted stitch by stitch, as if pixelated. Majd Abdel Hamid’s work encompasses both radical abstraction and an activist political stance, and offers a profound, open-ended reflection on the artist’s role as a mediator of social issues, through a practice that is by turns compulsive, therapeutic, and resilient.” Guillaume Désanges
Other works by this artist
