Majd Abdel Hamid
Majd Abdel Hamid is a visual artist from Palestine. He was born in Damascus in 1988, and is 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 include Muscle Memory, CCA: Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow; 800 meters and a corridor, gb agency, Paris (2022); A Stitch in Time, Fondation d'Entreprise Hermès, Brussels curated by Guillaume Desanges (2021). Majd Abdel Hamid's work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including Memory Sews Together Events That Hadn’t Previously Met, Sharjah Art Museum, Sharjah; Splendid Isolation, SMAK, Ghent; La Beauté du Diable, Frac Franche-Comté, Besançon (2022); Répare, Reprise, Cité International des Arts, Paris, (2021); Heartbreak, Ruya Maps,Venice; Touché! (gesture, movement, action), Beirut Art Center, Beyrouth, (2019); at Krognoshuset Lund in Sweden (2016), the Valencia Institute of Modern Art in Spain and the Halil Saakini Cultural Center in Palestine (2018). He has taken part 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. He was a finalist for the Young Artist of the Year Award, presented by the A.M. Qattan Foundation, in 2008, 2010, and 2012. He is actually in residency at Cité des Arts Paris.
Muscle Memory
2022,
Video, textiles, installation
This new body of work by Majd Abdel Hamid emerged in the aftermath of the 2020 explosion in Beirut, one of the cities in which he is based. The incident arose when a large ammonium nitrate stockpile exploded in the city’s port district, wiping out one-third of the surrounding urban area and leaving 300,000 people homeless. The blast caused a chain reaction of violent bursts within an ecosystem of «bubbles», both private and public. For the artist, the question was/is how to move forward after this event without being sucked into the double trap of a melancholic aesthetics and/or nostalgia. Hamid’s practice borrows from the history of embroidery in Palestine and seeks to impersonate this autonomous historical practice as a form of intimacy, creating a set of motifs in relation to his lived experience of Beirut. His ambivalence towards more explicit political expression is reflected in his choice of mostly abstract patterns. Muscle Memory exposes a set of grids and diagonals that evoke the ruined street plans of the city after the 2020 explosion. «Muscle Memory is an intuitive attempt to transform the experience of color, lines, and geometry into a motif that is then repeated until a pattern emerges.» (Majd Abdel Hamid)
Augarten Contemporary, hoast, IG Architektur, Laurenz, Neuer Kunstverein Wien, Never At Home, Waffen Franz Kapfer, New Jörg, Ve.Sch
October 17–December 17
Main Exhibition
Curators: Serge Klymko, Hedwig Saxenhuber and Georg Schöllhammer
Photo: Aurelien Molle. Credit the artist and GB Agency, Paris.