Without formulating answers, Palestinian artist Majd Abdel Hamid expresses these questions in humble and most often abstract forms. He does not seek to accuse, disclose guilt, or ask for collective reparations. He also does not gloss over the pain inflicted on people by tragedy; instead, he seems to take action while also keeping a certain distance. He is not trying to respond to history or topical issues. In his work, he asks us to slow down, to take the time required to think critically and awaken a poetic imagination.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Born in 1988 in Damascus, Syria, to Palestinian parents living in exile, Hamid grew up in Ramallah and Beirut. A Palestinian citizen, he does not limit his identity to this nationality alone, but instead believes that it is constructed and actualized according to his movements, whether they are forced or chosen. This mobility galvanizes his work. His multiform practice encompasses textiles, sculptures, videos, photographs, and even paintings. At the core of this multidisciplinarity, however, embroidery seems to be the medium that recurs most often. Hamid embroiders predominantly abstract compositions on multiple supports: canvases, pieces of clothing or recycled fabrics, handkerchiefs, dishcloths, soap fragments, plaster casts, cardstock. He expresses himself through small-scale, mundane objects that are not intended to be spectacular. These objects have a direct relationship with the hands that have spent hours embroidering them. Typically exhibited unframed, pinned to the walls or placed on plinths, the objects retain a fragility and a certain degree of mobility. The works stand with humility outside the aesthetic canons and historical hierarchies of European classical art. They put strain on the immutable nature of the artwork, encouraging instead an experimental and touching aspect. Their frayed, threadbare, or corroded edges, along with their wrinkled, folded, or bulging surfaces, materially attest to the vibrations and convulsions of the world like the scars left on bodies, territories, and memories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Majd Abdel Hamid<\/strong>
Muscle Memory<\/em>, 2022.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
In Hamid\u2019s work, embroidery and the recurring choice of abstraction satisfy \u201can obsessive urge\u201d^{1<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 1 <\/a> - Majd Abdel Hamid, \u201cI Have an Itch, I Have a Stitch, Embroidery Is a Necessity,\u201d Palm<\/em> 1, September 2021\u200a\u2013April 2022, accessible online.<\/span> to remove himself from the daily magmatic and oppressive influx of images. This practice offers him a form of escape, even distraction, although this does not mean that he seeks to run away from reality. It is more a question of abstracting codes and blurring images in order to challenge them better. His abstract embroideries crystallize moments and memories into geometric and organic motifs. In the series Muscle Memory<\/em> (2022), for example, designs consisting of delicately overlapping triangles, diamonds, squares, crosses, and angular spirals float on pieces of fabric with frayed edges. They translate into colourful cross-stitches the motifs, lines, pavements, or grids that he observes while walking in the city, which flood his memories like the Polaroids he takes as he goes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Majd$
Majd Abdel Hamid<\/strong>
Compositions<\/em>, 2020.
Photo: Aur\u00e9lien Mole, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Hamid\u2019s embroideries stem from an ancient and pluralistic heritage. Long discredited and excluded from the field of fine arts in Europe, embroidery is not bound by academic straitjackets; it therefore offers a certain freedom of expression. Furthermore, Hamid reminds us that \u201cit is one of the few mediums that exist, relatively speaking, outside the normative patriarchal power structure.\u201d ^{2<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 2 <\/a> - Hamid, \u201cI Have an Itch.\u201d<\/span> Deemed inconsequential as an occupation, it eludes censorship and enables a skilful transcending of conventions and prohibitions. In Hamid\u2019s work, the cross-stitch and half-cross-stitch techniques, such as the abstract motifs of geometric shapes and intersecting lines in *Muscle Memory<\/em>, in part demonstrate a particular interest in the tradition of Palestinian embroidery, which had its golden age from the mid-nineteenth century to 1948, the year of the Nakba.*^{3<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 3 <\/a> - The Nakba was the forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians after the State of Israel declared independence in 1948, and the resulting war.<\/span> Starting from this period of war, people didn\u2019t stop making embroideries, but they made them on the fringes of society. In refugee camps, the embroideries sewn to pass the time fostered intercultural dialogue among communities that previously had been geographically distant from each other. In 1988, during the First Intifada, when the Israeli occupying forces banned the circulation of the Palestinian flag, women started embroidering abstract motifs in the flag\u2019s colours on their dresses as a gesture of resistance and protest.^{4<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 4 <\/a> - On this topic, see Samih K. Farsoun, Culture and Customs of the Palestinians<\/em> (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 2004).<\/span> These dresses show a performativity of embroidery that not only preserves a tradition but also becomes a poetic and socially engaged language. Traditional clothing, a support for elaborately embroidered ornamentation, has had a symbolic function in Palestinian society for a long time. After the loss of a loved one, women dye their dresses indigo blue. As the dress is washed, the natural indigo pigment fades and the embroidered motifs resurface, like a metaphor for grief.^{5<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 5 <\/a> - Farsoun, Culture and Customs<\/em>.<\/span> Hamid takes up this gesture in Muscle Memory<\/em>, saturating his abstract embroideries with indigo before washing and rewashing them repeatedly to make the motifs visible. The intention is to evoke mourning as well as the sometimes exhausting labour required to make forgotten or suppressed memories resurface.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
In 2015, Hamid asked a Palestinian artisan to create an embroidery for him of a white rectangle on a white background. She refused, telling him that it was a waste of time. He then started teaching himself how to embroider and began an ongoing series of abstract works called Son this is a waste of time<\/em>. The title, of course, is a nod to the embroiderer. For hundreds of hours over the years, Hamid has sewn cross-stitches and half cross-stitches repeatedly to produce uneven white rectangles or squares on white backgrounds. Accepting the amateur aspect of the result, he leaves parts unfinished, ragged, or showing mistakes and plays with textures and tone variations, which emphasizes the haptic dimension of his works. The repeated motif inevitably evokes the radical White on White<\/em> (1918) with which Kazimir Malevich proposed a new aesthetic order surpassing classical art norms, just like the chaos caused by the First World War. Hamid likewise demonstrates this resolve as he sets ideals aside in order to work from observations, memories, and feelings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Majd$
Majd Abdel Hamid<\/strong>
Son this is a waste of time<\/em>, 2015-ongoing.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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The interwoven lines and mesh of the geometric forms he sews inherit aspects from the history of modernist abstraction, but also from Quranic traditions, in which abstract ornamentation resulted from the interdiction of representing figures.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Son this is a waste of time<\/em> is a way of passing the time, of undertaking a Sisyphean labour. The different embroideries composing the series of works were made in the studio, as well as in airports, hotel rooms, or on the various modes of transportation that Hamid has taken in his travels. They emerge out of empty moments and give rise to periods of absence and to white surfaces made vibrant through textured cotton stitches. Hamid does not plan his works in advance. He has no agenda other than the task of intuitively filling in, according to his feelings, moods, and memories, small pieces of fabric. Through this slow, meticulous, and repetitive action, he \u201ccan withdraw from the blackmail of images, news, statements, withdraw but without retreating to a sense of denial.\u201d^{6<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 6 <\/a> - Hamid, \u201cI Have an Itch.\u201d<\/span> Although the task might seem like a form of escape, it is nonetheless a way of responding to the world and its imperative to be productive: be everywhere, all the time. These white embroideries designate something that is impossible to represent\u200a\u2014\u200aloss, or even the pitfalls of history made invisible, the history of exiled and minoritized people. They are also spaces of possibility, areas to fill with desires and memories. Between a beginning and an end, the works in Son this is a waste<\/em> of time<\/em> invert their title, encouraging us to take a moment and reflect on the passing of time, the histories it retains and those it excludes. This does not mean wasting one\u2019s time or wallowing in nostalgia but, instead, experiencing a suspended moment conducive to thinking and dreaming.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On August 4, 2020, a warehouse storing many tons of ammonium nitrate exploded in the port of Beirut, in one of the most intense non-nuclear blasts in history. Hamid was in Beirut at the time and was among the approximately 6,500 people injured in the disaster. After this trauma, he felt temporarily unable to work on the white embroideries, since the safe haven that this practice represented for him had suddenly shattered, just like Lebanon\u2019s capital. Previously a calm space, white became a source of anxiety that he could not use for creation. He then took up colour and stitched five embroideries called Compositions<\/em> (2020), which translate his loved ones\u2019 descriptions of their places of refuge into abstract motifs and a lustrous palette. The result is an overlapping of geometric shapes, corners, and recesses, which, paradoxically, symbolize both safe, enclosed spaces and a city broken into a thousand pieces. The impossibility of representing the trauma of the explosion and its victims through images no doubt explains the choice of free and intentionally chaotic abstract compositions. In his own context, Hamid chooses abstraction to distance himself from conflict. He expresses himself through small, humble formats, fragments of individual memories attesting to a recent tragedy in our collective history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Majd$
Majd Abdel Hamid<\/strong>
Muscle Memory<\/em>, 2022.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Ultimately, memory is a key issue in Hamid\u2019s research. Through abstraction and a focus on materiality, he seeks to translate texture metaphorically, as in the installation Texture of Memory<\/em>, created for the Biennale de Lyon in 2024. In the installation, a paper leporello is covered with embroidered dots of colour, imitating the Jacquard looms used by canuts<\/em>\u200a\u2014\u200asilk weavers\u200a\u2014\u200ain nineteenth-century Lyon. The work explores Hamid\u2019s childhood memory of daydreaming musical compositions without ever playing them. This embroidery, therefore, is a kind of silent score. It is up to us to let the thread run loose and make the world hum its moments of beauty and its tragedies, its myriad memories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Translated from the French by **Oana Avasilichioaei<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n**
Curator, art critic, and teacher Thomas Fort lives and works in Paris. In his current research, he examines intercultural dynamics and issues of memory in contemporary art.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"How do we react to the world when it is collapsing? When trauma permeates the thoughts and bodies of people forced into exile, people who have lost their bearings? How do we cry? How do we talk about the hardships we\u2019ve experienced when we can\u2019t catch our breath? How do we bear witness to what has been lost? How do we remember?<\/br>","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":268438,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[882],"tags":[],"numeros":[7491],"disciplines":[],"statuts":[],"checklist":[],"auteurs":[971],"artistes":[7461],"thematiques":[],"type_post":[],"class_list":["post-268445","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-post","numeros-114-abstractions-en","auteurs-thomas-fort-en","artistes-majd-abdel-hamid-en"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268445","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=268445"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268445\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":268448,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268445\/revisions\/268448"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/268438"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=268445"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=268445"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=268445"},{"taxonomy":"numeros","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/numeros?post=268445"},{"taxonomy":"disciplines","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/disciplines?post=268445"},{"taxonomy":"statuts","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/statuts?post=268445"},{"taxonomy":"checklist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/checklist?post=268445"},{"taxonomy":"auteurs","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/auteurs?post=268445"},{"taxonomy":"artistes","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artistes?post=268445"},{"taxonomy":"thematiques","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/thematiques?post=268445"},{"taxonomy":"type_post","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/type_post?post=268445"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}