Majd Abdel Hamid
Majd Abdel Hamid was born in 1988 in Damascus, Syria, and is based between Beirut and Ramallah. He studied at Malmö Art Academy, Sweden (2010), and the International Academy of Art, Palestine (2007–2009). Working across video, installation, drawing, and sculpture, his practice is rooted in slow, performative gestures such as embroidery and cross-stitch, addressing themes of identity and trauma. Recent solo exhibitions include Muscle Memory, CCA Glasgow (2022); 800 meters and a corridor, gb agency, Paris (2022); and A Stitch in Time, Fondation d’Entreprise Hermès, Brussels (2021). His work has been shown at SMAK Ghent, the Sharjah Art Museum, Frac Franche-Comté, Cité Internationale des Arts Paris, Ruya Maps Venice, and the Beirut Art Center. He has participated in residencies including at the Sharjah Art Foundation, Former West (Berlin), and Truth is Concrete (Graz).
FROM THE SERIES SON, THIS IS A WASTE OF TIME
2015–
Cotton thread on etamine fabric, cotton thread on silk
Variable dimensions
Courtesy the artist and 16 avril, Paris
The work of Majd Abdel Hamid (b. 1988, Damascus) is grounded in embroidery as a slow, durational way of thinking. Across textile, video, drawing, and installation, the artist transforms stitching into a conceptual and political method, where repetition becomes both image-making and a form of attention. His works unfold through extended periods of manual labor, positioning time not as a neutral framework but as the central material of the work itself.
Drawing on the rich embroidery tradition of the artist’s homeland of Palestine, Abdel Hamid’s patterned pieces develop gradually, stitch by stitch, accumulating geometries, shifting grids, and subtle variations of color and white that oscillate between order and dissolution. Rather than illustrating fixed narratives, his works allow forms to emerge through the rhythm of making. This slowness resists the speed and extractive logic of contemporary image culture, proposing instead a mode of looking that is sustained and embodied.
Deeply informed by questions of displacement, fragility, and political memory, repetition in the artist’s work becomes a way of holding unstable histories and constructing meaning through endurance and care. In this sense, Abdel Hamid’s body of work proposes a form of thinking that is circular rather than linear, where each gesture is both continuation and interruption.
Majd Abdel Hamid participated in the Kyiv Biennial 2025 – Near East Far West (03.10.25–08.01.26) at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.
