Majd Abdel Hamid, Melanie Kitti: (inside) a wave, a cocoon

Fresco—a painting becoming wall with time. Embroidery—threads meticulously stitching movement. These are ancient skills that bare history and memory within them. Not as materials, but as testimonies. Silent processes performed through time consuming repetition and a slowness that embraces possible flaws in their narrative.

For Majd Abdel Hamid (Palestine, lives in Beirut and Paris) the sea, loss and trauma is his subject matter, and colourful threads his material. Self-taught in traditional embroidery, Hamid’s works are the result of careful crafting conceived as “sculptures in time” in their quest for resilient beauty amidst a continuous state of emergency. Remembering and existing can be an ongoing movement through your hand.

With pigments, limestone and plaster Melanie Kitti (Sweden, lives in Malmö and Copenhagen) both embraces and dissolves the boundaries between applied and fine arts. Personal and historical contexts are as intertwined as the layers of material she applies—scraping and painting, adding and erasing. And in this particular fresco painting, the symbolism inherent in the collective life of ants. Did you know that ants can perform highly skilled acts of surgery to heal their wounded fellows?

At the peak of the abyss, misery and frustration, there is something that reminds us that there are other possibilities, other probabilities—inside a wave of transformation rests a cocoon of change, protecting time from its turbulence.