Majd Abdel Hamid
Majd Abdel Hamid was born in Syria in 1988. He lives and works between Beirut and Paris. He trained at the Malmö Art Academy in Sweden in 2010, and at the International Academy of Palestine (IAAP) from 2007 to 2009. Nominated for the third edition of the Reiffers Art Initiatives Prize, he will be exhibiting at the Acacias Art Center from April 26 to June 8, 2024.
"Artisans of Sensibility"
Majd Abdel Hamid, 2023
"12 to 23 (end of chapter)"
Majd Abdel Hamid, 2023
"Artisans of Sensibility"
Majd Abdel Hamid, 2023
"It's still too soon to leave"
Majd Abdel Hamid, 2023Biography
His artistic practice is rooted in the slow, repetitive, performative gesture, including embroidery and cross-stitch on fabric supports, as a counterweight to high-speed digital image production and pixels.high-speed digital image production and pixels.
Majd Abdel Hamid actually works in a wide variety of media, including video, installation, drawing and sculpture, through which he explores themes of national identity and trauma. His work has been shown at Paris+ by Art Basel through the GB Agency gallery (2023), as part of the Hirafen exhibition in Tunis (2023), at the CCA in Glasgow and at the Sharjah Art Museum (2022).
He has participated 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.
Texts
Broderie: Majd Abdel Hamid, aux fils du temps
— Libération, 2022
Majd Abdel Hamid spends all his time as an artist embroidering. Although he departs from traditional decorative motifs and allows his canvas to bristle with a few badly stitched threads on small, sometimes crumpled, pieces of fabric, the artist, born in 1988, nevertheless bends to the rules of this craft, which he admirably admits is (or was) first and foremost the prerogative of women. And that they have made it anything but innocent and saintly.
A practice which, far from the standardized formats of the academic arts (painting, drawing), has escaped the aesthetic canons. As he reminds us in a lengthy introductory text, on the threshold of his exhibition at gb agency gallery (part of a series of individual shows, brought together under the overall title "Dance of Life"): "Embroidery is one of the rare means of expression to exist outside the normative structure of patriarchal power." A women's affair, then. Since men knew nothing about it, they were able to make embroidery a place of freedom, by no means confined to the domestic sphere.
A practice which, far from the standardized formats of the academic arts (painting, drawing), has escaped the aesthetic canons. As he reminds us in a lengthy introductory text, on the threshold of his exhibition at gb agency gallery (part of a series of individual shows, brought together under the overall title "Dance of Life"): "Embroidery is one of the rare means of expression to exist outside the normative structure of patriarchal power." A women's affair, then. Since men knew nothing about it, they were able to make embroidery a place of freedom, by no means confined to the domestic sphere.