Majd Abdel Hamid
It's still too soon to leave
2023 -
readymade, Polaroid, cotton thread on paper
19.5 x 14.5 cm. Unique
Majd Abdel Hamid draws on the tradition of Palestinian embroidery in his artistic practice. Abdel Hamid embroiders every day, as embroidery holds meditative powers in its repetitive actions and focus on details. He doesn’t rely on pre-made patterns or motifs, as is the norm with Palestinian embroidery, rather, he allows his hands to work through the repetitive acts of putting needle to fabric, improvising motifs as he goes along.
This piece 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.
It’s still too soon to leave is materially driven, embodying an urgency to pause and create a portable imprint of "daily life." Rather than a statement of exile or displacement, it serves as an intimate cast—both negative and positive—of a specific space and time, capturing mundane objects and moments.
This work is a composition with embroidery and a polaroid of Beirut, the first one of a series on Beirut.
“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-C
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
