Majd Abdel Hamid
Son this is a waste of time
2015 -
ongoing ,cotton thread on cotton fabric
17.5 x 13.5 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.
In 2015, the artist tried to commission a woman to create embroidery for him: he wanted to have white thread embroidered on fabric, but the woman told him she would not do it, adding, “Son, this is a waste of time.” Abdel Hamid ended up doing the embroidery himself, which turned into an ongoing series, a nod to the response by the seamstress . Stitching repetitively to fill the space of the fabric with white thread—it is a performance of transcribing time, transcribing a spectrum of intensities. The artist counts the hours each piece takes to complete.
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.
Reference MA-ISO-2015-F
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
