Palestinian artist Majd Abdel Hamid’s work is akin to an archeology of violence and trauma from which he unearths the materials that weave a web of new imagination. In doing so, he regenerates the art of cross-stitch embroidery, which has become an emblem of Palestinian identity, and applies it to historical and political subjects. Whether he embroiders media images of the Syrian war, in Snapshots (2016), or the architectural prison blueprint in Tadmur (2019), he transposes these horrors into the familiar space of domestic objects and time. Through this meditative needlework, the artist operates within a performative, repetitive gesture. In his work, stitching is articulated in terms of labor, time, form, color, imagery production, and the pixel. As such, Hamid’s practice functions within an assemblage of tensions: between the fetish and the aesthetic, between the individuality of art practice and the relative autonomy of craftsmanship, the slow process of rendering stitches on a surface and the acceleration of time, imagery and trauma. His works are situated within dichotomies of construction and concealment; they devour the banality of embroidery as a celebration of national identity.