Ode to the Sea is an ongoing body of work—a travel journal of various cities and islands around the Mediterranean Sea. The first chapter focuses on the Kerkennah Islands in Tunisia, the second on Beirut, and the third on Anafi Island in Greece. In each place, materials like fabric, soap, found objects, and threads are gathered. This travel journal evolves into a collection of photo books, sculptures, collages on cotton paper, videos.
The narratives emerge through visual and material compositions, creating a dialogue between sensory experiences and memories. Details such as shifting light, color studies, shades, and subtle impressions converge to evoke an ongoing, nonverbal diary.
Majd Abdel Hamid has chosen to focus his artistic practice on embroidery, a Palestinian heritage craft he taught himself. For almost a decade, this Palestinian artist, who was born in Syria in 1988 and now lives between Beirut and Paris, has been shaking up the codes of this intergenerational feminine practice that recently joined the List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. But far from the traditional motifs that usually adorn women’s clothing, the artist freely experiments with cross-stitching, creating his own repertoire of shapes, colors and materials, borrowing when needed from the history of modern painting. Unfettered by the norms and functions that traditionally govern their use, Majd Abdel Hamid’s embroideries come to life through experimentation. Threads of cotton, sometimes wool or silk, are intertwined, side by side or overlapping to form abstract, sometimes geometric shapes that materialize with the help of a needle on humble materials, new or used, and more recently on images. There are no preparatory drawings to aid the process, no patterns to guide the gesture—his spontaneous approach is driven directly by his feelings, moods and emotions, that result from a deep empathy. Designed as a reaction to current events, Majd Abdel Hamid’s embroidered works are sensitive renditions, a compendium of emotional states that enable him to apprehend, understand, feel and experience the world. Majd Abdel Hamid’s daily practice is compulsive and cathartic, and is driven by an obsessive, vital need. As a counterbalance to the uninterrupted flow of in formation and images that plague our environment, the artist embraces the slow progress of embroidery, a long, drawn-out process, far from friction and turbulence.
Like video and photography with which he likes to combine it, embroidery is for him a way of capturing and representing time, which becomes the de facto raw material of his work. Completing a piece takes hours and hours, sometimes hundreds of hours. He develops series—a principle that allows him to explore the same theme, the same motif—over several years. His creative approach is slow and meticulous, sometimes labo rious, especially when the material is recalcitrant. Making, undoing, doing and starting again are not just ways of ward ing off time. The artist doesn’t spare himself, and sometimes pushes his limits to the point of excess. But there is never any question of a show of force or virtuosity to achieve excel lence, only of aiming accurately. The repetition, consistency, rigour, patience and perseverance that are required of him can send him into a state of trance. “It has become an essen tial part of my daily habits, providing me with a safe space, like being in a state of light trance, where you can withdraw from the blackmail of images, news, statements, withdraw but without retreating to a sense of denial, a self-care ritual with a compulsive eagerness to be relevant. How can we distract ourselves while maintaining healthy proximity to society?” the artist asks. Embroidering becomes an act of resistance, resilience and wisdom, a salutary meditation that allows him to banish apprehension and anxiety by maintaining a safe distance with the hustle and bustle of the world, not too close so as not to fall. Embroidering produces a mental space, a shelter, an intimate safe space in which to escape reality.
Ludovic Delalande
