Cell Project Space

Opening: Thursday 27th March 2025, 6-9pm

28th March - 25th May 2025

12-6pm Thursday - Sunday

 

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’.

 

A body of work made for this exhibition, Fortune Tellers (2025–), extends Hamid’s interest in non-prescriptive futures. Over seven hundred hand-folded fortune tellers, modelled after the children’s origami game, become a ‘carpet’ of possibilities across the gallery floor. Unlike the game’s usual predetermined answers, Hamid’s fortune tellers bear no inscriptions, only the textures of the folded fabric, leaving the act of divination open-ended. What is folded can unfold – unconcealing, or perhaps reverting back to its source material. Laboriously crafted, they will be offered to be taken freely, one for each visitor, on the exhibition’s final two weeks. In London, a city where time is hyper-optimised and monetised, Hamid proposes a small act of gifting – without inscription, without demand. Fortune Tellers carves out a different sense of time, one where presence is neither archived nor commodified but simply passed on.

 

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.

 

Curator Adomas Narkevičius

 

 

If you require assistance to access the building or have any additional access questions please contact Annabelle Mödlinger, Production Assistant: annabelle[at]cellprojects[dot]org.

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