Screenshots (2016)

2015- ongoing

series of cross-stitch embroideries

coloured thread on canvas

These series tackle the visual “spectacle” produced, a barrage of images portraying crude violence that has been generated since the start of the revolution in Syria. Majd Abdel Hamid uses embroidery as a way of abstracting the horror of these pictures, and to intervene within them. In a period of desensitization to images, the extended time and repetitiveness that embroidery requires become a way of slowing down the attention of a viewer. drawing on Pop aesthetics, the flatness of these pieces mirrors reductively of media narratives and addresses, in turn, the sinister absurdity of contemporary political realities.

text taken from the exhibition Unravelled, curated by Rachel Dedman and Marie Muracciole’