Artist Spotlight: Majd Abdel Hamid

All photos in this article are credited to the artist.

Q. Resonance presents a series of embroideries representing the growth of a succulent plant. How and where is the concept of refusal woven into this work?

Majd Abdel Hamid: I was travelling for work to Anafi, in Greece, and I found this plant growing through rocks. I had done a project where I had made a motif of a plant that was considered ’harmful’ by the British Mandate, where I used a poem by Tupac Shakur titled The rose that grew from concrete. I took a picture and thought that this would be part of another project, where I would work on a travel journal of the Mediterranean sea. I then found the exact same plant on a friend’s balcony in Paris, he had brought it over from Jordan and planted it there.

I liked this idea of mobile plants, like migrating birds, where you take stems and grow them in other places. So, I took actually one stem [of his plant] to bring back to Beirut.

The plan was to just make a scan out of it and think about it and take pictures, because I wasn’t sure it would stay alive; but it travelled with me, and when I came back to Beirut I put it in water and it started growing. For the next, I think maybe six, seven months, I would take a picture of it every morning while having my coffee on the balcony. And I would just watch it grow.

Q. What was it about watching that plant over several months that made you realise its survival strategy mirrored human resilience under occupation? 

Abdel Hamid: It's about how you look at movement. There's a trauma in displacement, an analogy as being like an uprooted tree where there is no possibility of growth. That's one way to think about it, but another way is this idea of movement.

I think of resilience as acceptance of fragility, a way to adopt poetry for opening up possibilities, to work through cynicism. And to not allow occupation to take over your personal sovereignty over your imagination. I find, as an artist, a lot of value in fragility. I find it much more interesting than strength.

Q. For an artist working with slower mediums, how does a delicate piece of thread transform into an active gesture of defiance? 

Abdel Hamid: I think it naturally is [an act of defiance] when you think about who does embroidery. I am a bit of an intruder in the medium because it's mostly a women’s craft and in a way when you think about it, historically even, it's a very potent form of abstraction. If you look at what constitutes a motif of an olive tree or a pine tree, it becomes these pixelated images and it's repeated into patterns. So, it is a very popular way of abstraction.

I'm just trying to participate in this long standing tradition that is not only Palestinian, but a shared global experience.

People who do embroidery are also usually on the peripheries, and not the most powerful. It's a very humble medium but the simplicity gives you a lot of freedom of continuity because it's mobile and there is very little barrier of entry, in that you don't need a lot of a budget to start practicing.

Q. Your work resists "offering resolution" but "holds space for ambiguity, mourning, and subtle acts of defiance". In a world that often demands quick, polarised answers, why is it important for you that your art remains open-ended?

Abdel Hamid: I'm not nostalgic about free technology or anything. It's here, it's here to stay, and it's about how you use it at the end of the day. But I cannot adopt a code as a form of communication, of language, even. There is an obsession with optimisation. Poetry takes time and it's a lifelong commitment. We don't have to minimise costs and create grand pieces to make our presence known or make an impact.

I've always made the same size of embroideries and they're not larger because I don't want to do commissions; I don't want to hijack women's labour and participate in this system.  

I think of non-participation as a little way out, not to become reclusive or passive, but on the contrary: it's about creating work that does not give in to the blackmail. When I think of art, it is less about giving clear, static statements and more about opening up little spaces of wonder, maybe a little joy, and potentiality.

Q. Tatreez carries deep Palestinian cultural and historical lineage. How do you navigate the tension between honouring these traditional craft roots and employing them for contemporary conceptual expression?

Abdel Hamid: I'm not in a panic mode because we will not disappear, and by ‘we’ I mean Palestinians specifically. We are not going anywhere.

Everything is preserved. Maybe there is no one museum [preserving everything], but maybe the beauty of it is to have 200,000 museums where people keep things rather than having one centralised. It's a different way of thinking about preservation, but I think we're well beyond the point of fearing erasure.

It's about being aware as a generation. As I inherit this accumulation of work, to save, to keep, to maintain, to remake, what interests me in embroidery is the reactivation of it. Before ‘48, if you look at embroidery, there wasn't this rupture with our relationship with nature. There were all these beautiful ways of relating to your lived experiences, like dipping dresses in indigo dye when in mourning, as a very tactile way of grief.

Once you start putting these things inside glass boxes, in a way, it's not killing them in a dramatic way, but they stop being activated outside the museum.

Q. Much of your practice touches on shared trauma and history. How do you approach the responsibility of translating collective memories into a personal piece of art?

Abdel Hamid: I don't know if I can translate. I don't think of creating art as a way of translation or recording; at least now this is how I think about it. What art can offer is to process, maybe pause the fight-or-flight response, and allow yourself to “make.”

I decided not to use or work with any pictures of genocide and war; it feels like forensic evidence for court, I don't want it to become part of our heritage.

We are not in the post-colonial, we're very much still in the colonial. It's not the time to act on this now. That’s why I do embroidery; it’s kind of like a reminder of who you are, rather than responding to being attacked. You know, like who you are actually as a continuum of life, not only as someone who is only under occupation. And I feel this is very important for us as artists to do as well, because each one of us has a role in a way, not as a mass mobilisation but as a society.

Q. we refuse_d brought together four generations of artists in a collective stance of refusal. How do you see your quiet, textile-based methodology interacting with the legacy of the older generations featured alongside you, like Abdul Hay Mosallam Zarara or even Taysir Batniji?

Abdel Hamid: I am very happy and honoured to have my work presented with Taysir and Abdul Hay, but it is not for me to decide how my work fits with older and younger generations of artists. I think there is something very interesting that happens when you share exhibition space with other artworks; it creates resonances that you never thought about, it's this collective work with curators where in a way it's like conducting a musical piece, and we each have a part, only people who go into the exhibition can see it as a totality, and that is always a pleasure to experience with artists you appreciate and love their work.

Read about Majd Abdel Hamid’s work at we refuse_d and plan your visit to Mathaf today.

Reem Shaddad is Senior English Digital Editorial Specialist at Qatar Museums.