Majd Abdel Hamid

Daydreamers, Majd Abdel Hamid’s first solo exhibition in London, brings together a new and ongoing series of needlework. Initiated as early as 2012, these evolving and, at times, concluded bodies of work emerge from specific social and political moments, appearing as what the artist describes as ‘textures of memory’.

Hamid engages with time as both material and medium, employing embroidery as a technique of recording, reflection and refusal. His work is guided by slowness and repetition, building up intensities of feeling over narrative enclosure, at odds with the accelerationist logic of algorithmic visual culture. If the modernist grid sought to impose order, his stitches waver – accumulations of attention, of intimate, even flawed, labour, and of time worked through, or ‘wasted’.

In Daydreamers, the movement from one series to another is a continuous cycle of transformation: from fabric to thread, from thread to woven code, from leftover material to an object of potential. Hamid’s work unmakes the grid as a structure of control in favour of the imperfect, emerging rhythms of the hand. His practice draws on Palestinian textile traditions while remaining unbound by historical forms – using embroidery as a means of evading both the hierarchies of art historical canons and the pressures of ideological symbolism. His gradually accumulating body of thousands of hours of work is a commitment to slowness – a refusal of the now-ubiquitous temporality of algorithmic attention extraction, which takes hold over the qualitative sensation of time.

The exhibition marks a point of departure in the artist’s practice. If earlier works carry the repetitive compulsion to work through, here is a sense of release – not an erasure or a resolution but an opening towards what remains possible. It is a meditation on how everyday acts of making may partake in the understated project of continuity, possibility, quiet joy, and life.

—Adomas Narkevičius

Majd Abdel Hamid (b. 1988, Damascus) is a visual artist from Palestine, currently based between Beirut and Paris. He graduated from Malmö Art Academy, Sweden (2010) and attended the International Academy of Art in Palestine (2007-2009). Majd Abdel Hamid solo exhibitions were presented at Signal, Malmö (2024) and Fondation d’Entreprise Hermès, Brussels (2021). Majd Abdel Hamid’s work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including Biennale de Lyon; Phenomenon Anafi; Venice Biennial; Palais de Tokyo; Prix Reiffers Art Initiatives, Paris (2024); Art Explora; Photograph Pavillion 2023 Hirafen; Kyiv Biennial; Vienna Institut Français de Jerusalem; Qattan Foundation and Taawon Foundation; Sharjah Art Museum; SMAK, Ghent; Frac Franche-Comté, Besançon (2022); Cité International des Arts, Paris (2021); Ruya Maps, Venice; Beirut Art Center, (2019); Krognoshuset, Lund (2016); Valencia Institute of Modern Art and Halil Saakini Cultural Center, Ramallah (2018).

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With generous support by Fluxus Art Projects, Cockayne Foundation and The Elephant Trust.